Dispositivo para controle de maturação de frutas e controle de eficiência de biofilmes comestíveis

Abstract

The need to prolong the longevity of post-harvest fruits is a reality in the agroindustry, threfore, some techniques have been used, one of them is the edible biofilm, a coating to delay fruit maturation. However, the evaluation of biofilms is done manually, leaving room for interference and sensory subjectivities of the human being. Therefore, it was proposed in this work the design of a device to automatically evaluate the effectiveness of edible biofilms. The criteria for the test, the sensors, a single-board computer and a controlled-environment chamber employed and the digital image processing method were defined. The results and discussions brought a promising initial analysis, by noting trends in the maturation curves and differences between fruits with and without biofilm. Finally, it appears that the study area has much room for improvement through the analysis of new fruits, new image processing techniques and the application of other color scales.