Microwave Tomography for Food Contamination Monitoring

The security of packaged food needs to be guaranteed to safeguard customers health. A raise of complaints of physical contaminations into food products pushes for the development of additional monitoring techniques to prevent any kind of hazards, but also to protect brands from customers trust loss. In this work, a prototype working at microwave frequencies is assessed and tested in a significant environment. It exploits the dielectric contrast between contaminants and food content, and it is it is mainly focused on two classes of intrusions matters, i.e. plastic and glass fragments of few mm size, that have limited detection by the existing in-line technologies, such as X-rays systems. The measurements and the resulting 3-D image reconstructions are encouraging and allow to aim at the development of an industrial prototype, monitoring packaged food in real-time along a production line.