Table‐ripe soft avocado cannot be shipped or stored for more than a few days. Thus, it is common practice to store and ship firm, tree‐ripe avocado, while the consumer may soften the fruit as required. A human sorter cannot distinguish between a freshly picked firm avocado and a somewhat softer semiripe fruit, yet the accelerated evolution of ethylene by even several ripe fruits, may prematurely ripen a whole shipment. A sensor system, for nondestructive sensing of avocado firmness is presented, based on vibrationally exciting one side of the fruit, while measuring the transmitted vibration energy on its other side. Special signal processing hardware and software was developed for computing several alternative firmness indexes, highly correlated to the standard piercing force, destructive, test method. Optimal classification algorithms were developed, whereby the fruit may be classified into two or three firmness grades. In both cases, the actual contamination of the firm fruit class by soft fruits was only 3.3%, while the overall classification accuracy was about 90%.
Even slight nonlinearities in vibrating systems introduce instability frequency bands and unstable amplitudes. In many vibration problems it is desirable to know precisely the bounds of the instability frequencies and the associated amplitude ranges. Using a general nonlinear single degree of freedom system, based on a Coulomb friction augmented Duffing model, simplified graphical/analytical modus operandi was developed for computing singular amplitudes in the frequency domain. The method may be used in lieu of the usual phase plane approach wherein the physical meaning of the different vibration modes is obscured. In previous publications approximate estimation of instability frequency bands of the Duffing system was achieved by assuming variations about the steady state solution. The new method presented herein allows accurate determination of instability frequency ranges in a more general class of vibration systems, while quantifying “Horizontal Tangents Amplitudes,” in addition to the usual “Resonance Amplitudes” and “Vertical Tangents Amplitudes.”
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