Mass modeling of sour orange fruit with some physical characteristics

Physical characteristics of fruits and vegetables and their relationships are necessary for the design of some postharvest processing systems such as handling, sorting and packaging machines and reducing the processing costs. For proper design of grading systems, important relationships among the mass and other properties of fruits such as length, width, thickness, volumes and projected areas must be known.The aim of this research was to measure and present some physical properties of sour orange fruit. In addition, sour orange fruit mass was correlated to measured physical properties using Linear, Quadratic, S-curve and Power models. The results showed that the correlation of the mass of sour orange fruit with all measured physical properties was significant at the 0.0 level. For mass predication of sour orange fruit, the best and the worst models were obtained based on the volume of the fruit assumed as ellipsoid shape and first projected area of the fruit with determination coefficients (R2) of 0.968 and 0.835, respectively. At last, from economical standpoint, mass modeling of sour orange fruit based on the second projected area is recommended.

Keywords:

sour orange , physical characteristics , mass prediction