ACDA: Agricultural Crop Damage Assessment

ACDA: This team will design a rotary impact device to cause impact damage to agricultural crop materials then measure the degree of damage.

Faculty Mentors:

Description:

The objective of this project is to measure the damage to agricultural crop materials due to impact.  Damage to grain, fruits, and vegetables during harvesting and post-harvest handling results in significant food and feed losses.  To aid in the design of handling systems to reduce this damage, systematic measurements of material damage must be made.  In this project, a rotary impact device and an apparatus for quantifying damage will be designed and built.  Measurements of impact damage will be made for a variety of crop materials and the resulting data will be analyzed.

Relevant Technologies:

  • Mechanical Design, including CAD
  • Electric Motor and Controller Selection
  • Image Processing

Pre-requisite knowledge/skills:

  • Experience with mechanical design, CAD, motor and controller selection, and image processing will be helpful.
  • Although not needed, processing of images using machine learning may be helpful.
  • Basic knowledge of data analysis, e.g., curve fitting and goodness-of-fit testing will be helpful.