This past week, we decided to use Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR... we'll be saying IR for short) [learn more here!] and take a scan of all of our samples. So we took an inventory of all the chocolate products that we needed to analyze, and tagged each of them with a number so that we wouldn't be biased in our experiment (i.e. if Charmian knew which sample was Lindt, she might either 1) be tempted to eat it or 2) mess with the results). After all the IRs were taken, we tried to see if we could notice any trends just by eyeballing them and Andrew also decided that he would write a program using Java for spectra analysis.
For more details:
After taking all the inventory, we had 57 total samples! And that was only for chocolate bars. We do have truffles as well (about 10 of them), but until we figure out a better way to obtain just the chocolate from the truffles, we're setting them aside for now and concentrating on bars.
We wrapped a piece of each sample in some weighing paper, wrote its assigned number on it, and placed all the samples in a box so that we could store them all in a refrigerator.
A typical IR spectra that we saw from our samples looked something like this:
The peaks basically mean that there is a presence of certain compounds in the sample. For example, since there is a strong peak at about 2900cm-1, we can say definitively that there is a hydrogen bonded to a carbon, but not much more than that.
The next step is to figure out combination of ingredients from chocolate produced this spectrum as well as analyzing the spectra to see if there is some correlation between the samples (i.e. does the amplitude of certain peaks correlate to a certain percentage of cocoa in the product and whatnot).
We'll see you in the next post. :)
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