Investigation and Discrimination of Hand-Deboned and Mechanically Separated Pork Meat Using Ultrasonic Velocity Measurements

In this paper, we present an original ultrasonic technique to investigate and discriminate between different kinds of pork meat, i.e., hand-deboned (HD) meat and mechanically separated (MSM) meat. To this end, we measured the speed c of high-frequency f = 5 MHz ultrasonic waves propagating in the examined pork meat samples. The measured speed of longitudinal ultrasonic waves ranged from 1578 to 1610 m/s. Significant statistical differences were found between the speed of ultrasonic waves in the HD pork loin and pork neck, and those in various types of MSM. The newly proposed measurement (analytical) method, based on the determination of ultrasonic velocity, can be effectively applied to distinguish between manually separated (HD) and mechanically separated (MSM) pork meat. Importantly, the obtained experimental results were supported by a statistical analysis, showing highly significant correlations between the speed of ultrasonic waves and the content of water, protein, fat and sodium in the measured pork meat samples.