Quantification of Urea in Milk- A review of Existing Methods Dr. K.B.Ramesh

Abstract — The nutritional value of milk to human health needs no introduction. But it is alarming that many unscrupulous vendors are adulterating it with water, detergents, caustic soda, starch, formalin, urea, ammonium sulphate, sodium carbonate which have harmful effect on the human health. The greed for money has pushed them to the extent of producing synthetic milk which has no nutritional content. Many analytical techniques have been developed to qualitatively and quantitatively measure these adulterations. In this work we focus on the quantification of urea which is one amongst the many adulterants and provide an exhaustive literature survey of the available techniques for doing the same. Milk being highly perishable product, it is desirable to test it at the earliest opportunity rather than taking it to laboratory for analysis. With this mindset we propose a new technique to quantify the amount of urea in milk. Keywords—urea detection, biosensor, adulteration in milk, spectroscopic method, chemical method, piezoelectric crystal method, chromatographic method