International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Banana is an extremely perishable fruit thus post-harvest quality process changes quickly. Conventional banana ripeness assessment include sorting and grading based on human visual evaluation, ethylene hormone treatment, firmness check by penetrometer and soluble solid content measurement using refractometer are not effective to give uniform and quick result. Dielectric spectroscopy has been applied in agricultural materials as it offers relatively inexpensive assessment, nondestructive, fast and easy to operate system. In ripeness assessment, the magnitude phase of impedance value will increase with ripening stages over certain frequency. This study showed that impedance measurement was able to differentiate the unripe, ripe and overripe banana over the frequency of 20.1kHz to 30.1kHz. Soluble solid content (SSC) of banana was determined by developed model at the frequency of 21.1kHz.

Index Terms—Banana ripeness, dielectric, impedance, soluble solid content.

D. Jamaludin is with the Faculty of Engineering Universiti Putra Malaysia (e-mail: dyna1401@yahoo.com).
S. Abd Aziz was with Universiti Putra Malaysia. She is now the head department of Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering, (e-mail: suzana@eng.upm.edu.my).
N. U. A. Ibrahim is with the Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia (e-mail: nurulatikah.ibrahim@gmail.com).

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Cite:D. Jamaludin, S. Abd Aziz, and N. U. A. Ibrahim, "Dielectric Based Sensing System for Banana Ripeness Assessment," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 286-289, 2014.