Potential of Dual Energy X-ray Transmission on Food Safety

During processing and packing of food, foreign objects such as plastics, metals or glass can find their way into thefinal product without being noticed. Those contaminants may be hazardous for the consumer and thus cause huge productrecalls, and eventually harm the reputation of the respective producer. Dual energy X-ray transmission (DE-XRT) is a powerfultool in non-destructive testing and is expected to detect different contaminants in food better than standard radiography byproviding quantitative information like the areal density of the scanned material. We studied a nut mix, tofu balls, a wafer treatand frozen paella contaminated with aluminum, artificial bones and glass test objects of different diameters using DE-XRT.The study shows that DE-XRT is suitable to detect contaminan ts in the range of 1.5 mm to 6.0 mm in food. Especially inhighly heterogeneous environments, DE-XRT outperform conventional XRT.