Empirical study of the degradation of soybean oil correlated with its dielectric constant based on capacitive sensor

This paper suggests the use of a sensor to characterize the behavior of vegetable oils submitted to heating/cooling cycles, as an attempt to correlate this behavior with the dielectric constant of oil. Dielectric constant values were measured in soybean oil samples subjected to four heating/cooling cycles from 20 to 120 ºC. In the heating cycle, the dielectric constant of the samples had increased up to three times its initial value and the decay curve of dielectric constant obtained during cooling was different from that of the heating cycle. After each heating/cooling cycle, the value of dielectric constant was increased, signaling a permanent change in the physicochemical properties of the samples. These results suggest that measuring the dielectric constant can be a fast and inexpensive method to characterize vegetable oils subjected to temperature variations. The application of this simple test may be useful in the quality assessment of the soybean oil used in successive operations of food frying.

Empirical; dielectric constant; degradation; oil; soybean oil.