Current Issue : April - June Volume : 2014 Issue Number : 2 Articles : 6 Articles
A capacitive sensor method for measuring billet spacing uniformity with sugarcane (Saccharum officinarm L.) billet\r\nplanter is investigated in this paper. Therefore, an electronic device based on capacitive sensor was designed and developed to\r\npredict the planting spacing of sugarcane billets. It consisted of four components: a rectangular parallel plate capacitor,\r\nelectronic circuitry, microcontroller, and display unit. Accordingly, a prototype of the precision metering device for sugarcane\r\nbillets was developed. After calibrating the monitoring system, the results were verified with calibrated curve by means of\r\nlinear regression and paired T-test. The performance of the device, including quality of feed index (QFI), multiple index and\r\nmiss index was investigated under laboratory conditions using a capacitive sensor and a test stand with camera system. The\r\nresults revealed that the forward speed had a significant effect on these variables. The coefficient of variation was less than\r\n3%, which indicated that billet spacing calculated via capacitive sensing method has no significant difference with the\r\ncomputed billet spacing via image processing method....
Banana is a year round fruit in Bangladesh. After harvesting, banana is attacked by postharvest disease caused by\r\nsome fungi. The quality and quantity losses of banana occur due to disease attacks and lack of proper postharvest handling.\r\nFungus can be destroyed or made inactive by chemical or heat treatment. Most of the chemicals are hazardous to human\r\nhealth. Heat treatment technology is simple and is a non-chemical method to kill or inactivate pest and to control fungus. A\r\nhot water treatment plant was designed and developed with local materials for treating banana fruits. Overall dimensions of\r\nthe hot water treatment plant were 1600 mmÃ?â??926 mmÃ?â??1566 mm and operated by an electrical motor of 0.38 kW. Water was\r\nheated by the six electric immersion heaters of 2,000 W of each. The capacity of the plant was 350 kg h-1. The price of the\r\nhot-water treatment plant was Taka 1,00,000 (US$ 1300) and treatment cost was Taka 0.55 kg-1 ($0.007). The effective\r\ncombinations of temperatures and exposure periods of BARI Kola 1 and Sabri Kola were found to be 55Ã?°C for 5 min. When\r\nthe banana fruits were treated with hot water, the shelf-life of the fruits was found to increase by 30% and the postharvest loss\r\nreduced by 70% over those of untreated bananas. The break-even point of the plant was 70 h yr-1. Banana fruits treated by\r\nthe plant can be profitable to traders when the annual use of the plant exceeds 70 h. Payback period of the plant was estimated\r\nto be 26 d. Therefore, there is a good opportunity of farmers and traders to increase income and generate employment using\r\nthe hot water treatment plant....
Orange has abundant nutritional properties and is consumed worldwide. Sorting oranges of different masses based\r\non their physical traits could help reduce packaging and transportation cost. The ââ?¬Ë?Bloodââ?¬â?¢ cultivar of Iranian oranges from\r\nKermanshah province of Iran (7.03 Ã?°E 4.22 Ã?°N) was used in this study. 100 samples were randomly selected. During the\r\ntwo-day experiment, all measurements were carried out inside the laboratory at mean temperature of 24Ã?°C. In this study, some\r\nphysical properties of ââ?¬Ë?Bloodââ?¬â?¢ orange were measured, such as length, width, thickness, volume, mass, mean value of geometric\r\ndiameter, sphericity and projected area. ANFIS and linear regression models were employed to predict the mass based on\r\nsphericity and mean of projected area inputs. In ANFIS model, samples were divided into two sets, with 70% for training set\r\nand 30% for testing set. The coefficient of determination (R2) for ANFIS and linear regression models were 0.983 and 0.927,\r\nrespectively. It is shown that the mass can be estimated based on ANFIS model better than linear regression model....
Precision agriculture is a farming management concept based on observing and responding to intra-field variations.\r\nOne of the most important soil properties in farming is soil moisture content and it is necessary to develop new technique for\r\nmeasuring this property in a precision farming system. This study investigates the measurement of moisture content in soil\r\nusing an on-site, easy to use and real-time acoustic wave system. The system consists of the propagation of acoustic waves\r\nsuch as sweep frequency sound wave (10-300 Hz) and multiple tone sound waves (120 Hz) through the soil. Some properties\r\nof these acoustic waves enable estimation of soil water content such as peak amplitude (A), total power (TP), total harmonic\r\ndistortion (THD) and signal to noise ratio (SNR). The results showed that the best model for estimating the soil moisture\r\ncontent was the model that expressed relationship between A and soil moisture content with R2 = 0.999 (using sweep frequency)\r\nand relationship between TP and soil moisture content with R2 = 0.999 (using multiple tone). It is argued that the change in\r\nthe sound characteristics related to the soil moisture content can be used for a continuous monitoring and control of irrigation of\r\ncrops....
In the humid and sub-humid areas, agricultural production is largely rain fed and this needs to be urgently\r\nsupplemented by irrigation practice if the country is to meet its food demand. A two years study was carried out at the\r\nexperimental site of the Institute of Agricultural Technology and Biosystems Engineering, Johan Heinrich von Th�¼nen Institute\r\n(vTI), Braunschweig, Germany to compare performance of maize crop for silage production using three different irrigation\r\nsystems; rain fed, drip and rain-gun sprinkler. Growth parameters such as plant height, stem diameter were measured. The\r\ntotal yields of silage were obtained for all treatments at the harvesting. The experimental results reveal that total yields\r\nobtained from different treatments were 25.76, 24.23 and 9.30 Mg ha-1 in drip, rain-gun and rain fed irrigated maize,\r\nrespectively. The results also showed that the water use efficiency reached 11.01 kg m-3 for drip irrigation in while it was\r\n8.84 kg m-3 for rain-gun system....
Determination and controlling of quality parameters can be useful for ordering and marketing of fruits. Color is the\r\nfirst and the most important parameter in the visual appearance of fruits, specifically in banana. The aim of this study is to use\r\nimage-processing technique (online operation) to measure and analyze the color change of banana slices during thin layer\r\ndrying. Using online-image-processing technique resulted in designing a machine vision system to control the color change of\r\nproducts automatically. The results show a linear relation with high correlation coefficient for L*, a* and b* (0.967, 0.962 and\r\n0.991 respectively) between the data of the image-processing technique and the hold-hand colorimeter. In this study,\r\nparameters of chroma, hue and browning index were determined to describe the kinetics of color change in banana slices. The\r\nchange of chroma was not significant, but hue was decreased and browning index was increased during drying time. In\r\naddition, the experimental data of the L* and ?E was fitted using zero and first order models with high correlation coefficient\r\n(0.80-0.97)....
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