Instrumented pseudofruit for acquisition of impact damage data for agricultural perishables

Abstract

Impact bruising during harvesting, manual and mechanical handling, and during transportation of agricultural perishables results in major crop loss and/or commodity quality loss. An instrumented pseudofruit has been developed which permits automatic measurement and recording of vector accelerations (impacts) along with the time of occurrence. This device will assist in identifying time and amplitude of damaging impacts. The features of this device are: (1) It is a miniaturized, totally integrated, portable digital system which is cast in a 15-cm rigid cube or 10-cm-diam sphere. (2) It is calibrated to provide an adequate degree of accuracy for the measurement of impact it will experience. (3) Serial communication is provided to permit program initialization and data transfer to an independent processing computer, where custom-developed routines convert the measured impacts into equivalent bruising and/or drop heights for the fruit of interest (e.g., apple).