Determination of Verdet Constants of Several Plant-Based Cooking Oils

Lim, Chin Keat (2020) Determination of Verdet Constants of Several Plant-Based Cooking Oils. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

In this project, we have investigated the phenomenon of Faraday rotation in plant-based cooking oils. In order to improve the existing Faraday rotation experiment, we have devised a new and consistent calibration procedure based on a Glan-Taylor polarizer. The new procedure allows us to perform a consistent procedure to measure the change in the Faraday rotation angles. Using this new procedure, we determine the Verdet constants for three commercial plant-based cooking oils, namely, extra-virgin olive oils, refined palm oils, and canola-sunflower oils. Except for canola-sunflower oil, all the Verdet constants for refined palm oils and extra-virgin olive oils are found to be higher than the Verdet constant for distilled water. Additionally, we found that mixing refined palm oil with the other two types of oils results in reduced net effect of the Faraday rotation and lowers the Verdet constant for the oil mixtures. Based on our results for these oil mixtures, the refined palm oil has an opposite chirality with respects to the other oils. The sign of Verdet constant must be accounted for in the experiments. By mixing the sample oil with reference oil that has a known chirality, the sign of chirality for the sample oil can be qualitatively identified in the experiments based on Faraday rotation.