Prediction of Damage Volume on Apple Basing the Dielectric Property

Dielectric property was used to rapidly evaluate the degree of damage basing the obviously correlation between dielectric property and damage of fruit. Fuji apples which were pressed in different static pressure by universal testing machine were stored 29 days in room temperature(22±1) ℃ and monitored the change of damage volumes and dielectric parameters. The results showed that the damage volume and relative dielectric constant of damaged apple increased with the prolongation of storage time,which were bigger with the increasing of pressure,and the loss factor’s change of apple was variable during storage and could’t be used to predict the damage volumes because of the difference of ε″ was non-significant on the degree of damage. The equation,which was built basing the significant positive correlation between relative dielectric constant and damage volume(r=0.921)to predict damage was V_B=-1.374＋0.227ε'(R²=0.848). By relative dielectric constant and the mean variation between prediction result and experiment result was 23.37%. The research result could provide new method for evaluating fruit quickly and build the basement for evaluating fruit by dielectric property.