Dielectric properties of honey adulterated with sucrose syrup

Sucrose syrup is a common additive in honey adulteration. To provide information for developing a cheap, simple, convenient and rapid sucrose–adulterated honey detector or sucrose content sensor, the permittivities of pure jujube, yellow-locust and milk-vetch flower honey, pure sucrose syrup and honey–sucrose syrup mixtures with sucrose content from 0% (pure honey) to 80% (pure sucrose syrup) were studied from 10 to 4500 MHz with open-ended coaxial-line technology and a network analyzer at room temperature. The correlations between permittivities and sucrose contents were regressed. The results showed that the dielectric constants of all samples decreased with increasing frequency, while the pure honey had higher dielectric constant than pure sucrose syrup. Dielectric relaxation existed in all samples. The maximum loss factor decreased with increasing sucrose content. The relaxation frequency changed very little with sucrose content. Strong negative linear correlation, R > 0.98, was found between loss factor around the relaxation frequency and sucrose content. Crown Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.