Identification of The Important Volatile Organic Component in Cardamom based on Silica-Modified Piezoelectric Resonator

This paper studies the identification of 1,8-cineole, an oxygenated monoterpenoid which is the most abundant volatile organic compound (VOC) present in Cardamom utilizing a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensor. Cardamom, a very costly spice is known for its wide applications in medicinal as well as its aromatic fragrance requires proper quality estimation for consumer benefit. A silica gel coated QCM sensor (SIL-QCM) has been fabricated using the nebulization coating process. Different sensor characteristics study viz. sensitivity, selectivity, reproducibility, and repeatability have been carried out with the fabricated sensor in the presence of different dominating VOCs present in Cardamom. The SIL-QCM sensor showed good sensitivity of 0.0795 Hz/ppm with the linearity of R2 = 0.9938.