Evaluation of Physical Characteristics of Typical Maize Seeds in a Cold Area of North China Based on Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

The physical properties of maize seeds are closely related to food processing and production. To study and evaluate the characteristics of maize seeds, typical maize seeds in a cold region of North China were used as test varieties. A variety of agricultural material test benches were built to measure the maize seeds’ physical parameters, such as thousand-grain weight, moisture content, triaxial arithmetic mean particle size, coefficient of static friction, coefficient of rolling friction, angle of natural repose, coefficient of restitution, and stiffness coefficient. Principal component and cluster comprehensive analyses were used to simplify the characteristic parameter index used to judge the comprehensive score of maize seeds. The results showed that there were significant differences in the main physical characteristics parameters of the typical maize varieties in this cold area, and there were different degrees of correlation among the physical characteristics. Principal component analysis was used to extract the first three principal component factors, whose cumulative contribution rate was over 80%, representing most of the information of the original eight physical characteristic parameters, and had good representativeness and objectivity. According to the test results, the classification standard of the evaluation of the physical characteristics of 15 kinds of maize seeds were determined, and appropriate evaluations were conducted. The 15 kinds of maize seeds were clustered into four groups by cluster analysis, and the physical characteristics of each groups were different. This study provides a new idea for the evaluation and analysis of the physical properties of agricultural materials, and provides a new method for the screening and classification of food processing raw materials.

Field irrigation using magnetized brackish water affects the growth and water consumption of Haloxylon ammodendron seedlings in an arid area

“…Principal component analysis (PCA) is a statistical method that transforms multi-index into a few comprehensive indexes by using the idea of dimension reduction (Xin et al, 2019 ; Wang X. K. et al, 2020 ; Bi et al, 2022 ). These comprehensive indicators retain most of the information of the original indicators (Shi et al, 2021 ; Tang et al, 2021 ). The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) value was 0.582 and Bartlett's sphericity test was p < 0.001, indicating that PCA could be performed (Hao et al, 2022 ).…”

“…A similar study reported by also showed that magnetization treatment effectively alleviated the inhibitory effect of salt water irrigation on the growth of grape stems and leaves. Zhao et al (2021) reported that magnetized water irrigation increased plant height, leaf area index, and dry matter accumulation of winter wheat.…”

Field Investigation of the Static Friction Characteristics of High-Yielding Rice during Harvest

“…The square box with grains or stems was placed on the right side of the plate surface and the angle adjusting device was slowly rotated to tilt the stainless-steel plate. When the square box (with grains or stems) started to rotate, the rotation angle was recorded [41,42]. The static friction coefficients of the rice grains and stems with different configurations were measured once.…”

Physical characterization of morphologically diverse colour maize (Zea mays) seeds

“…However, the chroma and hue ranged from 1.63 to 15.84 and 26.80 to 92.81, respectively. The seeds with similar physical attributes like colour can be pooled in one group through clustering methods and then comprehensively evaluated (Tang et al 2021). The other morphological characters like dent corn or quality traits like waxy corn or sweet corn also have been considered for comparative evaluation on the physical basis (Coskun et al 2006, Sharma et al 2017.…”