• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.391-398
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• 2002

During handling unitized products, they are subjected to a variety of environmental hazards. Shock and vibration hazards are generally considered the most damaging of the environmental hazards on a product and it may encounter while passing through the distribution environment. A major cause of shock damage to products is drops during manual handling. The increasing use of unitization of pallets has been resulted in a reduction of the shock hazards. This has caused an increasing interest in research focused on vibration caused dam age. Damage to the product by the vibration most often occurs when a product or a product component has a natural frequency that falls within the range of the forcing frequencies of the particular mode of transportation being used. Transportation vibration is also a major cause of fruit and vegetable quality loss due to mechanical damage. This study was conducted to determine the vibration characteristics of the corrugated fiberboard bones for packages of pears, and to investigate the degree of vibration injury of the pears in the boxes during the simulated transportation environment. The vibration tests were performed on an electrohydraulic vibration exciter. The input acceleration to exciter was fixed at 0.25 G for a single container resonance test and 0.5 G for the vertical stacked container over the frequency range from 3 to 100 Hz. Function generator (HP-33120A) was connected by wire to the vibration exciter for controlling the input acceleration at a continuous logarithmic sweep rate of 1.0 octave per min. The peak frequency and acceleration on the single box test were 22.02 Hz, 1.5425 G respectively, and these values on the vertical stacked boxes were observed from the bottom box 19.02, 18.14, 16.62 and 15.40 Hz and 2.2987, 3.7654. 5.6087, and 7.9582 G, respectively. The pear in the bottom box had a slightly higher damage level than the fruit packed in the other stacked boxes. It is desirable that the package and transportation system has to be so designed that 15∼20 Hz frequency will not occur during the transportation environment.