Applied near-infrared spectroscopy team in West Anhui University, Lu’an, China

Abstract

The applied near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy team of West Anhui University was founded by Professor Bangxing Han. It has 15 members, including Professor Cunwu Chen, Associate Professor Hui Yan, Dong Liu, Fangli Gu, Chuanbo Sun, PhD, Fucheng Zhu, Chen Song, Peipei Wei, Hui Deng, Xueping Jiang, Fang Wang, and five master students. Figure 1 shows some members of our team. The team members have various theoretical knowledge and practical experiences in NIR spectroscopy, chemistry, pharmacy, biomedicine, computer software, and network engineering, which makes our team scientific and reasonable. After years of development, we have established a multi-level academic team and a system for cultivating talents. The team has developed a lot of projects related to the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the quality of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Many research platforms, such as the national technical system of the TCM industry, national expert service base, Anhui engineering laboratory for conservation and sustainable utilization of TCM resources, and Anhui province collaborative innovation of Dendrobium engineering technology research center, have been established by our team. Recently, the rapid non-destructive analysis method has attracted worldwide attention in the area of TCMs. In 2009, since a National Natural Science project has been carried out in 2009, over 20 research projects have already been obtained by our team which were founded by National forestry industry-standard preparation and revision project, National forestry science and technology promotion demonstration Fund project, Major increase and decrease projects of the central government, National agricultural standardization demonstration area project, The National Key Research and Development Program of China, foundation of Anhui educational committee, excellent youth foundation of Anhui scientific committee, and projects supported by the enterprise. In the past period of time, taking bulk rare and endangered authentic TCMs (Dendrobium huoshanense, Chrysanthemi flos, Peucedani radix, Pseudostellariae radix, Rosae laevigatae fructus, Caryophylli flos, Chaenomelis fructus, etc.) as the research material, our team focused on the core technologies of the applied NIR spectroscopy, such as methods of determination and developments of the hardware devices and software. Fortunately, the team has established a novel NIR spectroscopy pattern recognition system and updated a series of NIR hardware equipment. Especially, the comprehensive quality evaluation on-site, real-time monitoring online, and rapid automatic sorting technology have been systematically investigated. Meanwhile, the team has obtained a series of achievements in science and technology. Eight enterprises have been guided to apply these achievements and achieved obvious economic and social benefits. All in all, the obtained scientific achievements have poured a solid foundation for the development of standardization for the TCM and agricultural industry.