Fully Automated Flow Injection Analyser for the Determination of Volatile Acidity in Wines

摘要

A fully automated method based on both Flow Injection (FI) and analytical pervaporalion for the determination of the volatile acidity in wine is here presented. Both the different hardware units that constitute the analyser and data collection are controlled by a computer. The method is based on pervaporation of the volatile compounds present in wine into an indicator solution and monitoring the absorbance change, which is correlated with the volatile acidity content. The control software was developed with Java, C and XML programming languages. The analysis frequency and the precision of the method were 10 samples per hour and 0.035 g l ~(-1) , respectively. The validation of the method was carried out with respect to the Mathieu method. The proposed method correlates (r = 0.95) with the Mathieu method (the standard method in wineries).