The magical "electronic nose" is here, you can "smell and identify tea" in two minutes! ?

There are school exams in the afternoon and team meetings at the company in the evening. Li Xinyi, a sophomore at Zhejiang Agricultural and Forestry University, is the general manager of a startup company.

What kind of meeting? The one in May was about the sales progress of the product. The product jointly developed by Li Xinyi and her classmates, the "Yunbi Zhijian" tea quality rapid detection system, has been purchased and used by many companies in Hangzhou. The students want to study how to further expand sales channels and upgrade products.

“Electronic nose” test tea data. Photo provided by the interviewee

People often say that when drinking tea, the first thing you drink is the tea aroma. Experienced tea lovers can often tell whether the tea is good or not from its aroma. Li Xinyi's team has mastered the key to the tea aroma and developed an "electronic nose". When the tea leaves are placed under a thin and long probe for testing, the "electronic nose" can "smell" the tea's origin and quality information in as fast as 2 minutes, with a measurement accuracy of up to 99.8%.

Li Xinyi told reporters that at present, the detection system is most familiar with West Lake Longjing. Whether it is real Longjing, this year's new tea or last year's old tea, the detection probe can tell with just one "smell". She introduced that the human body has millions of olfactory cells, and by sensing different molecular structures in the gas, our nose can recognize different smells. "The electronic nose simulates this process, and retrieves and analyzes the data through the component information of characteristic volatile gases in different tea odors."

The team inspected the tea garden. Photo provided by the interviewee

It is understood that before, most tea testing on the market used chemical analysis methods, which required steps such as crushing, titration, and extraction. It was time-consuming and consumed a lot of manpower and material resources. It was difficult for companies to promote it widely, let alone help ordinary consumers to conduct tests. Li Xinyi's team conducted relevant surveys through 3,078 valid questionnaires. The results showed that both tea producers and tea consumers hoped to have efficient and accurate tea testing technology to effectively solve the problems of tea origin fraud and inferior products being sold as good ones.

Since the end of 2022, Li Xinyi has started to gather students from different majors, including the Internet of Things, tea science, computer science, and big data, to form the Yunbi Zhijian Technology Team. In more than a year, they have tested 12 popular teas on the market, including West Lake Longjing and Keemun black tea, collected nearly 1.5 million experimental data, and combined artificial intelligence, programming, gas sensors, data visualization interfaces, data analysis and other technologies to successfully propose this detection technology that can achieve non-destructive but high accuracy, low cost, fast and simple detection.

When he first heard about the students' idea, Hui Guohua, a professor at the College of Mathematics and Computer Science of Zhejiang A&F University, was very supportive. He believed that college students should not just attend classes and get credits as their main purpose during the four years, but should practice more and experience more. "Such cross-disciplinary, application-oriented research can help students improve their professional skills, information retrieval ability, and problem-solving ability in actual combat."

Hui Guohua revealed that the team has now formed a relatively mature operating model. Almost every week, everyone will organize 2-3 group meetings to break down the staged problems. As a mentor, he will give full support and attention, and at the same time try to give everyone space to solve problems freely.

Product experiment process: Photo provided by the interviewee

"The Internet of Things Engineering undergraduate student is the CEO, the Big Data undergraduate student is the salesperson, and the Tea Science undergraduate student is the product consultant..." Li Xinyi told reporters that the 13 most important "colleagues" in the team have very clear division of labor, so during the research and development process, everyone can solve the problems and challenges encountered relatively smoothly. So far, the team has published many influential SCI papers in top international journals and obtained many invention patents and software copyrights.

Group photo of team members

In her sophomore year, Li Xinyi has determined her future goal to continue to develop and upgrade this "electronic nose" product, so that it can not only distinguish Zhejiang tea but also go beyond the province, expanding the database of famous tea producing areas such as Anhui and Fujian. Professor Hui Guohua also has higher expectations for the students' projects: "The instruments we develop can be smaller and more portable. Not only tea, but also the application areas of future products can be expanded to more agricultural products. Do a good job in cultivating college students, cultivate young talents who contribute to the country's science and technology, and ultimately realize the empowerment of science and technology to make more contributions to modern agriculture."

The new generation of young people in the new era are contributing more to the promotion of new quality productivity. They have innovative ideas and can bring science and technology to a wider range of fields; they have unlimited vitality and are not afraid of difficulties and are happy to conduct scientific research; they also have beautiful aspirations and are brave enough to pursue their favorite careers and forge ahead into the future.

Li Xinyi and others are lucky, as they grew up in an era where technology is the priority. During the interview, the reporter found that everything from the open education provided by the instructors to the financial support for the Zhejiang A&F University's undergraduate innovation and entrepreneurship projects, as well as the Zhejiang Province New Talent Program, are providing students with motivation to move forward and sufficient support for their growth.

At the same time, young researchers such as Li Xinyi will shoulder more missions and responsibilities. In an era of rapid technological development, university education is no longer limited to the worship of books and a single evaluation system. The new era requires all young people to have new technological concepts, use new technological tools, learn across disciplines, jointly promote the development of new quality productivity, and lead the society to progress together.