Articles
ACCURATE LOW COST MEASUREMENT OF BLUEBERRY FIRMNESS FOR RESEARCH WORKERS
Article number
346_47
Pages
338 – 353
Language
Abstract
Vaccinium researchers are often asked to provide quantitative and comparative measures of fruit firmness at harvest.
Data sets containing important production information which could be correlated with fruit firmness are not fully utilized or developed for lack of an inexpensive and reliable means to accurately measure this firmness.
A low cost Ametek compression tester was investigated in an effort to characterize its ability to measure berry firmness in an analogous manner with the much higher cost laboratory Instron universal materials-testing machine.
The important effects of deformation rates and transducer deformations are explored both experimentally and theoretically.
Data corrections for both effects are considered.
Two years of data on several highbush and rabbiteye cultivars of blueberries grown in North Carolina show that the Ametek measurement correlated above the 0.9 level with the Instron readings, but when corrected, over-estimated the stiffness by 6.6%. ‘Croatan’, a cultivar commonly grown in North Carolina was relatively soft and averaged only about 2/3 the firmness of the recently-released cultivar ‘Reveille’. In all, 9 important commercial cultivars of blueberries grown in North Carolina were tested and compared.
Data sets containing important production information which could be correlated with fruit firmness are not fully utilized or developed for lack of an inexpensive and reliable means to accurately measure this firmness.
A low cost Ametek compression tester was investigated in an effort to characterize its ability to measure berry firmness in an analogous manner with the much higher cost laboratory Instron universal materials-testing machine.
The important effects of deformation rates and transducer deformations are explored both experimentally and theoretically.
Data corrections for both effects are considered.
Two years of data on several highbush and rabbiteye cultivars of blueberries grown in North Carolina show that the Ametek measurement correlated above the 0.9 level with the Instron readings, but when corrected, over-estimated the stiffness by 6.6%. ‘Croatan’, a cultivar commonly grown in North Carolina was relatively soft and averaged only about 2/3 the firmness of the recently-released cultivar ‘Reveille’. In all, 9 important commercial cultivars of blueberries grown in North Carolina were tested and compared.
Publication
Authors
R.P. Rohrbach, C.M. Mainland
Keywords
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