Cédric Boey

Implementation of a rational drying process for fish conservation

Fishing is a traditional activity that is widespread in West Africa. One of the greatest problems for fishermen and a cause of lack of food accessibility is the difficulty in conserving fish. Drying is a widely used technique in sub-Saharan Africa for preservation of fish. However, drying is a complex process, making the construction and calibration of efficient drying devices challenging. This paper presents the construction and calibration of five mobile fish dryers in Mali and, for one of them, development of a method for its use. The performances achieved far exceeded those of traditional solar dryers as drying was faster and the fish were not contaminated by being exposed to flies. Furthermore, construction and user manuals were written for the local fishermen which were well understood as the fishermen were able to disassemble and reassemble the dryers when they were required to be moved.

Building a virtual data acquisition chain to teach and learn instrumentation

A modular virtual data acquisition chain implemented on LabVIEW is presented in this article, which is intended to illustrate and teach instrumentation. The signal can be viewed at any point of the chain and under the influence of any parameter change. The acquisition chain accuracy and student applications are detailed in the case of an electroencephalograph (EEG) setup. 1 Freely available for download at http://beams.ulb.ac.be/beams/research/all/virtualchain.html