Sweetness test for melons

Citation

(2001), "Sweetness test for melons", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 31 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.2001.01731cab.003

Sweetness test for melons

Sweetness test for melons

A new test has been devised by Colin Greensill and Kerry Walsh at Central Queensland University, Australia for sorting melons which are marketed through one of South Australia's largest fresh produce suppliers. In current techniques a light is shone at the sample as it passes along a conveyor belt and a probe measures the light that passes through the fruit and into the detector. This gives a measurement of the quality of the flesh. However, some of the light can be reflected by the surface of the fruit, causing unreliable results, and the only way to exclude this is by physically creating optical barriers to prevent the extra light entering the detector. The new technique uses a quartz-tungsten-halogen light source to illuminate the fruit and an acceptance probe to measure the incoming light. The probe houses a mirror to direct incoming light to the optical fibre of a sensor. The alignment of the light source and probe means that any unwanted light does not fall within the angle of the fibre optic and is not transmitted to the detector.