Design of a Sensor to Detect Fruit Freshness

Abstract

Fruits and vegetables constitute a significant part of human diet habit for decades. In modern age with the increased disease variant, people became more curious about the natural and organic nutrition. This current of thought has brought some problems with it which are mostly related to freshness. As fruits and vegetables are a good source of food for us they are also good hosts for microorganisms like bacteria and fungi too. Foods contaminated by microorganisms could cause serious health problems in addition to that, decayed fruits and vegetables create several problems during imports and exports, during their storage for food related companies and markets. To find a solution to these problems a freshness sensor is developed which works with the principle of measurement of ion concentration change occurred in fruits and vegetables. Performed tests show that according to ion concentration change we could determine the freshness of fruits and vegetables. This method doesn¡¯t need any chemical pretreatment and it is not a type of storage method like in literature. This sensor can be used easily during grocery shopping by consumers, by import and export quality controllers or by any food related factory since it could give an average time of usage and this sensor could prove even frozen foods' freshness.

Keywords: Freshness, fruit, vegetable, freshness sensor, spoilage.