Accelerated lipid oxidation using non-thermal plasma technology: Evaluation of volatile compounds

Non-thermal plasma technology has been investigated for the first time to induce realistic lipid oxidation reactions. Today accelerated lipid oxidation methods are often temperature-based although it is known that widely divergent kinetics and side-reactions occur as a function of the employed temperature. In this paper both a thermally-based reference test and experiments using three types of plasma (Ar plasma, oxygen-doped Ar plasma, water-doped Ar plasma) were investigated. Treatment of fresh reference vegetable oil with pure argon plasma did not induce lipid oxidation reactions. Contrarily, a short treatment with both 0.3% O2/Argon and 0.3% H2O/Argon plasmas resulted in the production of several oxidation products that were also identified in naturally oxidized oil. MS-fingerprinting analyses, supported by the degree of difference sensory testing, indicated that current plasma configuration induces changes that are different from these measured in naturally aged vegetable oil. Chemical profiling of the secondary volatile lipid oxidation products showed that atomic oxygen resulted mainly in aldehyde production, while singlet oxygen induced the formation of 2-pentyl furan. Vegetable oils exposed to Ar/0.3% H2O plasma were characterized by lower amounts of oxidation products. It can be concluded that plasma technology is an innovative and a promising technique to investigate the role of individual reactive species and/or unravel oxidation reaction pathways, with the potential to become a more representative accelerated food aging technique.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Accelerated lipid oxidation using non-thermal plasma technology: Evaluation of volatile compounds journaltitle: Food Research International articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2014.04.043 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.status: publishe