• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.897-904
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• 2008

Egg grading machine is used in poultry raising industry to classify eggs by their weight and to pack up them. Packer holder mechanism is a main part of the egg grading machine, of which role is to take eggs fallen from conveyor belt, and afterward to transfer eggs vertically to mold tray. The vertical motion of packer holder is usually driven by slider-crank mechanism or cam. This paper describes development of the cam in packer holder based on kinematic analysis of packer holder mechanism and measurement of acceleration and noise of the cam to verify performance of it. Several cams that are designed and manufactured by the author of this paper according to different design specification are compared to determine the best solution for egg transfer in the packer holder mechanism.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.103-104
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• 2007

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.96-104
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• 2008

An egg grading machine is composed of many mechanisms of which functions are to carry eggs to the bucket in that sensors are located to categorize eggs by their weight, to transfer eggs from the basket of packer holder to the mold tray, to feed the mold tray dispenser after egg chairs are filled with eggs. This paper deals with the analysis and new design of packer holder mechanism of which function is transfer eggs vertically from the bucket conveyor to the mold tray dispenser. Egg is fragile to impact so in designing packer holder mechanism it is necessary to estimate moving speed, acceleration and impact when eggs are touched by any links of mechanism and mold tray dispenser. A new packer holder mechanism is proposed in this paper, which use quick return mechanism composed of 6 links with pin and contact joints.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.43-49
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• 2012

This study was carried out to investigate the effects of age of laying hens and grade of shell abnormality on internal egg quality. At each week, 1,000 eggs were randomly selected from 21,000 eggs laid by Hy-Line hens (100,000 birds) aged from 56 to 62 wk. The samples were divided into normal and externally abnormal eggs by an official egg grader. Then, egg quality including egg weight, egg white height, Haugh unit and yolk color was evaluated from each normal and abnormal eggs. The production rate of externally normal and abnormal eggs was 81.22 and 18.78%, respectively. No difference found in the production rate by the increase of hen's age, but Haugh unit of eggs from hens of 60-wk-old was higher (p<0.05) than that of 56-wk-old. When the same age groups were compared, egg white height and Haugh unit were lower in eggs which were externally abnormal. When the grade of abnormality increased, egg white height and Haugh unit were decreased further (p<0.05). Among the externally abnormal eggs, malformation showed the lowest Haugh unit. In conclusion, the shell abnormality of eggs laid by hens aged 56 to 62 wk was closely related with internal egg quality. Therefore, the grading external egg quality in the present egg grading system is directly related with the internal egg freshness.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1996.06c
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• pp.834-841
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• 1996

Egg production in Korea is becoming automated with a large scale farm. Although many operations in egg production have been and cracks are regraded as a critical problem. A computer vision system was built to generate images of a single , stationary egg. This system includes a CCD camera, a frame grabber board, a personal computer (IBM PC AT 486) and an incandescent back lighting system. Image processing algorithms were developed to inspect egg shell and to sort eggs. Those values of both gray level and area of dark spots in the egg image were used as criteria to detect holes in egg and those values of both area and roundness of dark spots in the egg and those values of both area and roundness of dark spots in the egg image were used to detect cracks in egg. Fro a sample of 300 eggs. this system was able to correctly analyze an egg for the presence of a defect 97.5% of the time. The weights of eggs were found to be linear to both the projected area and the perimeter of eggs v ewed from above. Those two values were used as criteria to sort eggs. Accuracy in grading was found to be 96.7% as compared with results from weight by electronic scale.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.319-323
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• 2006

Heritabilities and genetic correlations of economic traits were estimated with a multiple-trait animal model on 5 different strains of Korea Native Chickens (KNC): Red Brown (RB), Yellow Brown (YB), Gray Brown (GB), Black (B) and White (W). The data used for this study were collected from the Daejeon branch of the National Livestock Research Institute and included 11,233 performance records and 12,729 individual animals. DFREML and SAS BASE/STAT packages were used to estimate genetic parameters and descriptive statistics. The estimated heritabilities for strain RB, YB, GB, B and W, respectively, for age at 1st egg were 0.24, 0.27, 0.12, 0.32 and 0.18; for body weight at first egg were 0.39, 0.43, 0.38, 0.52 and 0.57; for body weight at age of 270 days were 0.43, 0.51, 0.30, 0.52 and 0.67; for egg weight at first egg were 0.08, 0.13, 0.07, 0.06 and 0.07; for egg weight at age of 270 days were 0.37, 0.43, 0.22, 0.34 and 0.41; and for number of eggs laid by age of 270 days were 0.24, 0.25, 0.37, 0.36 and 0.30. The genetic and phenotypic correlations were also estimated.

• Korean Journal of Poultry Science
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.233-238
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• 1995

A computer vision system was built to generate images of a single, stationary egg. This system includes a CGD camera, a frame grabber, and incandescent back lighting system. Image processing algorithms were developed to inspect egg shell and to sort eggs. Those values of both gray level and area of dark spots in the egg image were used as criteria to detect holes in egg and those values of both area and roundness of dark spots in the egg image were used to detect cracks in egg. For a sample of 300 eggs, this system was able to correctly analyze an egg for the presence of a defect 97.5% of the time. The weights of eggs were found to be linear to both the projected area and the perimeter of eggs viewed from above. Those two values were used as criteria to sort eggs. The coefficients of determination(r$^2$) for the regression equations between weights and those two values were 0.967 and 0.972 in the two sets of experiment. Accuracies in grading were found to be 95.6% and 96.7% as compared with results from sizing by electronic weight scale.

• Korean Journal of Poultry Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.43-54
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• 1993

Egg production in Korea was 393 thousand M/T in 1990. More than 10 thousand M/T egg was imported and the amount imported has increased every year. Despite consumption tendency of increasing processed food, creation of additional demand is not likely because domestic egg consumption mainly depends upon table eggs. Processed eggs for marketing in Korea could be classified into two kinds. One is primary processed eggs including liquid eggs and egg powders. The other is secondary processed eggs which are further processed such as egg flake and egg curd. In addition to the above egg products, specific nutrient fortified eggs are produced through the modified feed formula and breeding techniques. The technologies developed so far including Korean patents are introduced. Convenient foods using egg and nutrient controlled eggs will be popular in the near future. For example, low cholesterol egg and polyunsaturated fatty acid fortified egg will be produced to meet the consumer demand. However, facing problems such as introducing egg quality grading systems and extending the short shelf-life of washed eggs should be solved as well.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.348-354
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• 2008

Egg grading is determined by exterior and interior quality. Among the evaluation methods for the egg quality, a candling method is common to identify eggs with cracked shells and interior defects. But this method is time-consuming and laborious. In addition, practically, it is challenging to detect hairline and micro cracks. In this study, an on-line inspection system based on acoustic resonance frequency analysis was developed to detect hairline cracks on eggshells. A roller conveyor was used to transfer eggs along one lane to the impact position where each of eggs rotated by the roller was excited with an impact device at four different locations on the eggshell equator. The impact device was consisted of a plastic hammer and a rotary solenoid. The acoustic response of the egg to the impact was measured with a small condenser microphone at the same position as the impact device was installed. Two acoustic parameters, correlation coefficient for normalized power spectra and standard deviation of peak resonant frequencies, were used to detect cracked eggs. Intact eggs showed relatively high correlations among the four normalized power spectra and low standard deviations of the four peak resonant frequencies. On the other hand, cracked eggs showed low correlations and high standard deviations as compared to the intact. This method allowed a crack detection rate of 97.6%.

• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.69-75
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• 2013

This study was conducted to investigate the reliability of automatic cracked and bloody egg detector according to the age of the hens and the level of the detector. The results of this study are expected to be helpful in the implementation of the Korean egg grading system, which is expected to improve egg quality for consumers. An official egg grader randomly selected 1,000 eggs for each experiment (total 36,000 eggs), ran them through the automatic detector, and conducted labor inspection using the eggs that were classified by the detector as cracked, bloody, and normal eggs. The results showed that more cracked eggs were laid by hens aged 40-60 weeks than by hens aged 30 weeks (p<0.05). Also, when the detector level increased from four to seven (i.e., when it became less sensitive), its cracked eggs detection rate dropped, and the total rate of cracked eggs was consistent after the labor inspection of the classified eggs. The automatic detector achieved over 97 percent accuracy. The bloody eggs constituted only 0.005 percent of all the samples, and all the detector-detected eggs were bloody eggs after the labor inspection of both the bloody and normal egg lines. Therefore, it can be concluded that the automatic cracked and bloody egg detector was reliable and can be used in the egg grading system. Considering that cracked eggs should be less than 9 percent of first-grade eggs in the present egg grading system, the use of an automatic crack detector may help provide better-quality eggs to consumers by producing less than 5.5 percent cracked eggs.