Design, Fabrication and Testing of Exponential Horn for Measuring Ultrasonic Attributes of Agricultural Produce
Journal Title: Journal of Agricultural Machinery - Year 2012, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
Non-destructive ultrasonic testing is one of the methods utilized to evaluate quality of agricultural produce. Transducers used in this method are made for basically industrial applications. Since ultrasonic attenuation of waves in agricultural produce is very high, industrial transducers cannot be used in agriculture and needs to be modified. This is done with horns that concentrate energy on a small area at a certain distance from the transducer. In this paper, an exponential horn was designed, fabricated and tested using theoretical and computer-aided methods. Results showed that highly sophisticated horns can be designed using computer-aided method with a high accuracy. Analysis of the number of elements on the natural frequency of horn proved that the analysis was not precise at the low number of elements. Therefore, the number of elements should be increased when natural frequency of horn is almost fixed. The minimum number of elements was obtained to be 300. A comparison between theoretical and computer-aided methods showed a desirable performance of the computer-aided method with an error less than 1% without solving very complicated equations. Based on statistical analysis of the data, the effect of produce thickness (potato and carrot) on the velocity of ultrasonic waves in the horned probe was not significant. However, for the un-horned probe, velocity changed significantly with the sample thickness which is not desirable. Therefore, horned probe is more suitable for non-destructive ultrasonic tests than the un-horned probe.
Authors and Affiliations
R. Meamar Dastjerdi,S. Minaei,M. H. Khoshtaghaza,
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP717667
- DOI -
- Views 48
- Downloads 0
Design, Development and Evaluation of a New Motorized Hydraulic Hole-digger for Spot Treatment
Introduction Nowadays, the best method for fertilizing trees is spot treatment via hole-digger. Conventional mechanical hole-diggers have several drawbacks such as augerâs non-continuous and limited speeds due to using...
Prediction of Soil Fragmentation During Tillage Operation Using Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS)
Suitable soil structure is important for crop growth. One of the main characteristics of soil structure is the size of soil aggregates. There are several ways of showing the stability of soil aggregates, among which the...
Online Identification of Defect Bottles in Production Line of Soft Drink using Machine Vision
Introduction Nowadays the packaging of a product is considered as a symbol of its quality and has a direct effect on its consumer-satisfaction and sales. The visual inspection method is much slower and more error-prone t...
Investigating the Impact of the Magnetized Water on the Growth and Germination of Five Wheat Grain Seeds
Introduction Cereals as one of the most important sources of food plants could provide more than 70% of the food for the human population. Passing of water from the magnetic field is among approachable methods in order t...
Effect of Potassium Permanganate Nano-Zeolite and Storage Time on Physicochemical Properties of Kiwifruit (Hayward)
In this research, kiwifruits (Hayward) were selected in two mass ranges (large and small). They were placed in one-liter glass bottles in the vicinity of the polyethylene sachets containing potassium permanganate nano-ze...