Irish potato quality monitoring and control system.

Abstract

Irish potato freshness level is an important factor determine the quality potatoes for consumption. This system has been designed to automatically detect changes in the storage conditions in a very fast non-destructive way. In traditional storage systems, storage owners have to visit the storage system regularly to measure the various environmental parameters such as temperature humidity and carbo dioxide concentration to ensure maintenance of good quality Irish potatoes. Even though these traditional storage methods have been used for the methods are hectic and fail to maintain the environment parameters for the storage methods accurately in real time. In contrast, a storage system stores crops where environmental parameters are adjusted based on crops types. Irish potato quality monitoring and control system was developed to give ease terms monitoring environment parameters in the storage system that reduce the quality of stored Irish potatoes. The system is capable of monitoring and controlling the relative humidity. The system is implemented onto an Arduino microcontroller equipped with a humidity, temperature; carbon dioxide sensors as the monitoring and control tools to replace the human interaction to manually keep track of the suitable storage conditions. The system is also equipped with two selection buttons to enable multi' functioning of the different storage purposes. The selection made by the user activates the sensors that read values to activate the monitoring and control of the suitable conditions that support the storage in relation the purpose selected by the user. The system's inputs are the humidity and temperature sensed by the gas sensor that is DHT22 sensor the MO-5 sensor for carbon dioxide concentration and the selected input purpose where the status of the components is delayed on the LCD. The system has a high percentage of success but the errors due to the incremental in the gas sensor reading since the sensors are very sensitive to environmental changes. Thus it may be concluded that the system successful to automatically monitor and control the quality of the Irish potatoes and implementation of this system is expected to replace the traditional methods used for storage.