Portable food cutter with acoustic emission sensors
Problem statement
Food texture is a very important aspect of food processing and food waste. Consumers want their apples to be crisp, or their chips to be crunchy [2]. Food doesn’t even need to fully spoil before consumers will throw it out. Dry crispy foods like chips will go stale if the food structure absorbs too much water [3]. Once this happens the chips become chewy and, even though they are still edible, people will often throw them out. One way to help reduce these losses is to implement better testing methods to ensure better food processability. Testing has been done in this field for a long time, recording the force required to crush or cut foods, or testing the tensile strength. These methods however produce limited correlations between the data collected and the desirability of the food [4]. Acoustic emissions produced during the cutting process provide a much better correlation in determining the quality and desirability of food [4]. Our client has developed a testing device that records acoustic emission as it cuts food items, however their device is large and expensive and not practical in an industrial environment. Our goal is to redesign the testing device to be less expensive and more portable so that the device can be more versatile. Research facilities would be able to collect a wider range of data with a more portable device, farms could use it in their fields, and production lines could integrate them into food processing. This development would allow acoustic emission technology to reduce food waste and improve food production quality.
Team members
Thaying Vang – leader
Shane Kearns – communicator
Adam Wiegel – accountant
Apoorv Pandey – admin
Client
Melih Eriten, ME Faculty