Ethylene as an indicator for evaluating fruit ripening can be measured by very sensitive electrochemical gas sensors based on a high-resolution current produced by a bias potential applied to the electrodes. For this purpose, a measurement system for monitoring ethylene gas concentrations to evaluate fruit ripening by using the electrochemical ethylene sensor was successfully developed. Before the electrochemical ethylene sensor was used to measure the ethylene gas concentrations released from fruits, a calibration curve was established by the standard ethylene gases at concentrations of 2.99 ppm, 4.99 ppm, 8.01 ppm and 10 ppm, respectively, with a flow rate of 0.4 L·min⁻¹. From the calibration curve, the linear relationship between the responses and concentrations of ethylene gas was obtained in the range of 0–10 ppm with the correlation coefficient R² of 0.9976. The micropump and a novel signal conditioning circuit were implemented in this measurement, resulting in a rapid response in detecting ethylene concentrations down to 0.1 ppm in air and in under 50 s. In this experiment, three kinds of fruits—apples, pears and kiwifruits—were studied at a low concentration (under 0.8 ppm) of trace ethylene content in the air exhaled by fruits. The experimental results showed that a low cost, compact measurement system constructed by using an electrochemical ethylene sensor has a high sensitivity of 0.3907 V·ppm⁻¹ with a theoretical detection limit of 0.413 ppm, and is non-invasive and highly portable.

In order to simplify the process of analogue circuit fault diagnosis under the premise of improving the fault diagnosis rate of analogue circuit, and to deeply mine the fault characteristics of the output signal, a fault diagnosis method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. The output signals in different fault states are directly input into CNN for fault feature extraction and fault classification. By optimising the CNN model and its parameters, the 100% fault diagnosis rate of Sallen‐Key circuit can be achieved. The experimental results indicate that the CNN‐based analogue circuit fault diagnosis method simplifies the fault diagnosis process and improves the fault diagnosis rate.

Analog circuit is an crucial component of electronic equipment, and the ability to diagnose its fault state quickly and accurately is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of these electronic equipment. This paper addresses the problems of low diagnostic accuracy and the difficulties associated with model parameter selection in traditional fault diagnosis methods, particularly when dealing with nonlinear and non-stationary fault signals. A fault diagnosis method for analog circuits is proposed, which utilizes Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) for features extraction, the Maximum Information Coefficient algorithm (MIC) for features selection, and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for optimizing Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. Firstly, EEMD is used to adaptively decompose the fault signals in the circuit to extract multi-scale fault features. Secondly, the extracted features are quantitatively evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient and energy value analysis, leading to the construction of a fault feature vector is constructed. On this basis, the MIC feature selection algorithm is applied to further optimize the feature vector. Finally, an efficient fault classification model is developed by optimizing the hyperparameters of the SVM model using PSO. The simulation results show that the proposed method effectively overcome the problems of model complexity and low classification accuracy caused by improper selection of wavelet basis function. The accuracy of fault diagnosis and the efficiency of model training are significantly superior to those of traditional methods.

Fault prognosis of electronic circuits is the premise of guaranteeing normal operation of a system and carrying out on-condition maintenance. In this work, the remaining useful life (RUL) of electronic elements was estimated by selecting fault features based on variance, measuring fault severity based on relative entropy distance, and conducting fault prognosis based on the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) model. At first, the corresponding voltages of amplitude-frequency response, under conditions of changing full-band element parameters, were extracted, and then the frequency bands with large change amplitude were further selected based on variance. Afterwards, using relative entropy distance, the degradation of element parameters was measured, and then the RUL of electronic elements was diagnosed through regression analysis by GBDT. By comparing the data with those arising from the use of other distance-measuring methods, the relative entropy distance shows a larger change range and less apt to suffer interference from noise, which is favorable to subsequent regression prediction. The regression analysis through GBDT is easy to understand and conveniently applied in engineering practice. The application of the method proposed in the study in two examples of electronic circuits indicates that the prediction accuracy of the method for RUL of electronic elements is higher than that of the other distance-measuring methods, and its application in engineering practice is convenient.

The aim of this work is to identify the adulteration of edible gelatin using near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with supervised pattern recognition methods. The spectral data obtained from a total of 144 samples consisting of six kinds of adulterated gelatin gels with different mixture ratios were processed with multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), Savitzky–Golay (SG) smoothing, and min-max normalization. Principal component analysis (PCA) was first carried out for spectral analysis, while the six gelatin categories could not be clearly distinguished. Further, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA), backpropagation neural network (BPNN), and support vector machine (SVM) were introduced to establish discrimination models for identifying the adulterated gelatin gels, which gave a total correct recognition rate of 97.44%, 100%, 97.44%, and 100%, respectively. For the SIMCA model with significant level α = 0.05, sample overlapping clustering appeared; thus, the SVM model presents the best recognition ability among these four discrimination models for the classification of edible gelatin adulteration. The results demonstrate that NIR spectroscopy combined with unsupervised pattern recognition methods can quickly and accurately identify edible gelatin with different adulteration levels, providing a new possibility for the detection of industrial gelatin illegally added into food products.

Edible gelatin has been widely used as a food additive in the food industry, and illegal adulteration with industrial gelatin will cause serious harm to human health. The present work used laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) coupled with the partial least square–support vector machine (PLS-SVM) method for the fast and accurate estimation of edible gelatin adulteration. Gelatin samples with 11 different adulteration ratios were prepared by mixing pure edible gelatin with industrial gelatin, and the LIBS spectra were recorded to analyze their elemental composition differences. The PLS, SVM, and PLS-SVM models were separately built for the prediction of gelatin adulteration ratios, and the hybrid PLS-SVM model yielded a better performance than only the PLS and SVM models. Besides, four different variable selection methods, including competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), Monte Carlo uninformative variable elimination (MC-UVE), random frog (RF), and principal component analysis (PCA), were adopted to combine with the SVM model for comparative study; the results further demonstrated that the PLS-SVM model was superior to the other SVM models. This study reveals that the hybrid PLS-SVM model, with the advantages of low computational time and high prediction accuracy, can be employed as a preferred method for the accurate estimation of edible gelatin adulteration.