"CHARACTERIZATION OF SLAUGHTERED AND NON-SLAUGHTERED GOAT MEAT AT LOW FREQUENCIES"

The electrical stimulation of meat has a high potential for use in the quality control of meat tissues during the past two decades. Dielectric spectroscopy is the most used technique to measure the electrical properties of tissues. Open ended coaxial cable or two parallel plates integrated with network analyzer, impedance analyzer or LCZ meter have been used to measure the dielectric properties of meat for different purposes. The purpose of this research is to construct a capacitive device capable of differentiating slaughtered and non-slaughtered goat meats, by determining the dielectric properties of goat meat at various frequencies and storage times. The detector cell has two circular platinum plates assembled on the micrometer barrel encased within a perspex box material to form the capacitor. The test rig is validated to insure it is working well. Two goats were slaughtered in the same environment. One of the goats was slaughtered properly (Islamic method) and the second one was killed by garrote. The measurements were done on the hindlimb muscles. The sizes of samples were 2 em diameter and 5 mm thick. The slaughtered and non-slaughtered meat samples were separately placed between the capacitor plates. The capacitance and dissipation factor were measured across the capacitor device which was connected to a LCR meter. The experiment was repeated for various frequencies (from I 00 Hz to 2 kHz), and at different storage times (at I day after slaughtering to 10 days). Maxwell Garnett mixing rule was applied to obtain the theoretical value of the effective permittivity by using goat muscle and blood permittivity. The results show that the device is able to differentiate slaughtered and non-slaughtered goat meat. At all applied frequencies, the relative permittivity of the non-slaughtered meat were clearly more than the relative permittivity of the slaughtered meat which agrees with the simulation results. The dissipation factor of the non-slaughtered meat was less than the dissipation factor of the slaughtered meat