DIELECTRIC PROPERTIES OF PROPERLY SLAUGHTERED AND NON PROPERLY SLAUGHTERED CHICKEN

Meat is considered as a healthy source of food. To get the nutritional values of meat, some precautions and considerations have to be taken into account. One of the most effective and powerful parameters that can influence and affect the quality of meat is the amount of residual blood in the meat after slaughtering the animal. Blood is a good medium for microorganisms to grow and multiply. Proper slaughtering of animals is considered as a key factor to reduce the blood volume in the meat. It is believed that only one-third of the total body blood remains as the residual blood inside an animal flesh when that animal is slaughtered in a proper way. Currently, there is lack of a suitable device to differentiate properly slaughtered meat from non properly slaughtered meat. The aim of this research work is to design a capacitive device to differentiate properly slaughtered chicken from non properly slaughtered chicken. Dielectric properties (relative permittivity and dissipation factor) of properly slaughtered chicken and non properly slaughtered chicken were measured using the designed parallel plate capacitor and LCR meter in the frequency range 100 Hz to 2 kHz. The measurements were conducted at 3 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours and up to 15 days after slaughtering. There was a clear difference between properly slaughtered chicken and non properly slaughtered chicken with regard to dielectric properties and colour. The performance of the designed parallel plate capacitor was verified by measuring the dielectric constants of perfect dielectrics such as A4 paper and FR4 substrate. Very low percentage error (0.47%) was achieved, which makes this technique reliable to be used to measure the dielectric properties of meat. Experimental results were validated through theoretical calculation using Maxwell Garnett Mixing Rule.