*Manuscript Resolution of galactose, glucose, xylose and mannose in sugarcane bagasse employing a voltammetric electronic tongue formed by metals oxy- hydroxide/MWCNT modified electrodes Acelino Cardoso de Sá*1,2, Andrea Cipri2, Andreu González-Calabuig2, Nelson Ramos Stradiotto1 and Manel del Valle*,2 1Department of Analytical Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 55 Rua Francisco Degni, Araraquara 14800-060, SP, Brazil. 2Sensors and Biosensors Group, Department of Chemistry, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edifici Cn, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain *e-mail:
[email protected] ABSTRACT Second generation ethanol is produced from the carbohydrates released from the cell wall of bagasse and straw of sugarcane. The objective of this work is the characterization and application of a voltammetric electronic tongue using an array of glassy carbon electrodes modified with multi-walled carbon nanotubes containing metal (Paladium, Gold, Copper, Nickel and Cobalt,) oxy-hydroxide nanoparticles (GCE/MWCNT/MetalsOOH) towards a simpler analysis of carbohydrates (glucose, xylose, galactose and mannose). The Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based prediction model has resulted satisfactory for all carbohydrates and the obtained response had shown an adequate accuracy. In this manner 192 architectures were evaluated. The final architecture of the back-propagation ANN model had 36 input neurons, a hidden layer with 5 neurons and the tansig transfer function, an output layer with 4 neurons and the purelin transfer function. All species a comparison correlation coefficient of r ≥ 0.99 for the training subset and of r ≥ 0.96 for the test subset, being close to the ideal value. Keywords: Electronic Tongue, Carbohydrates, Artificial Neural Network, Multi-walled carbon nanotubes, Metal nanoparticles, Second generation ethanol.