• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.271-278
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• 2001

Many workers in the garlic peeling factory are separating the sound peeled garlics from the unpeeled and defective ones in a manual way. In order to reduce the seasonal labor requirement and operating cost, the mechanized garlic sorting system such as the vision-based garlic sorter should be developed. This study was conducted as one of basic studies on developing quality evaluation technique for peeled garlics, especially to developed the system for acquiring the whole surface images of garlics with a CCD camera. The following results were obtained from this study. 1. The belt-type garlic rotation system was devised to apply for the vision-based garlic sorter and was tested to decide the criteria of design and optimum conveying speed. 2. To evaluate the performance of the developed garlic rotation system, feeding rate and rotating rate were measured under the conditions of four experimental factors such as the inclined angle of rotating belt, the inclined angle of feeding belt, the height of plate arrays on feeding belt and the conveying speed of belts. And the capacity of the system according to mixture ratios of peeled garlics and unpeeled garlics was analyzed as a feasibility test. 3. For the inclined angle of rotating belt 20°and height of plate array on feeding belt 22㎜, the maximum rotating rate for garlic samples including unpeeled ones was 81.1% at the conveying speed of 4.2 garlic/sec. And under these condition, the maximum feeding rate was 85% at the inclined angle of feeding belt 6.5°. 4. The capacity of the developed garlic rotation system was almost constant regardless of mixture ratio of peeled garlics and unpeeled garlics and its range was 2.95∼3.92 garlic/sec. At the conveying speed of 4.2 garlic/sec, the capacity of the garlic rotation system was calculated ad 58∼64 kg/hr. 5. To improve performance of the garlic rotation system, it is recommended to develop a device to slide garlics into feeding belt.