Pietro Piccarolo

Fruit Color Assessment for Quality Grading Purposes

Surface color is one of the most appealing factors that influence the consumer in the npurchase of fruit. To this extent large research efforts are devoted to the development of new ncultivars that improve color attributes of fruits. At the present stage, for the precise quality nassessment process the colorimeter only is available to provide standard color measures. nHowever, this instrument provides just punctual information on the surface color of the fruit. nThe aim of this research is to develop a system able to grade fruits on the base of the whole nsurface of the tested sample, and so independent of the bias introduced by operator the nchoosing the measurement points on the fruit surface. In this way, the researchers and the noperators could have at their disposal a new measurement system to grade the quality of the nfruits.

Grey-box models for steam soil disinfestation simulation

Agricultural and biological processes often involve complex phenomena that depend not only on time but also on other independent variables, like spatial coordinates. These processes are intrinsically distributed parameter systems whose modelling requires the adoption of (non linear) partial differential equation. Due to their complexity these models often involve parameters difficult to be estimated, require time-consuming computations and could be not suitable for control purposes.In this paper, a new model structure for the simulation of steam soil disinfestation processes has been developed. The proposed model is based on a grey-box structure and it is mainly constituted by a couple of lumped linear parameter varying (LPV) switching model.Attention is focused on the simulation of sheet steaming soil disinfestation processes that are nowadays gaining growing interest as an ecological alternative to methyl bromide fumigation. To this extent, the model has been identified and validated using real data collected during greenhouse and open field steam treatments.

Hybrid Models for Beef Meat Chilling and Delivering Optimization

Meat quality is highly influenced by chilling conditions during storage and transport. In nthese phases meat temperature is often heavily influenced by the logistic of the adopted nprocessing and delivering systems. In fact, from slaughter to consumer, beef carcasses nmovements are driven by a sequence of events depending on different factors such as work nscheduling, storage cells capacity, time-table of delivering, etc.. During these occurrences, meat ntemperature vary in a continuous way mainly depending on the room temperature at which is nexposed. nWith the aim to optimize storage and distribution chains, a hybrid model, where discrete events nand time-continuous behaviors are jointly considered, has been developed. nThe model has been identified and validated using data collected in some CE slaughtering ncertified plants (in Piemonte region, Italy) and describes the temperature of the meat during the nstorage and delivering processes taking into account the logistic and the degree of utilization of nthe plant and of the available resources. nFinally, with the aim to improve and optimize plant efficiency and meat quality, different logistic nalternatives have been evaluated by varying the parameters of the refrigeration plants and/or nthe work and delivery scheduling.