Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Effects of Time after Harvest and Rate of Loading on Force Relaxation Behaviour of Local Variety of Grapefruit (LemunTaba)
1F.A. Dakogol, 2S.E Obetta and 2O.J. Ijabo
1Department of Agricultural and Bio-Environmental Engineering, Federal Polytechnic Nasarawa, Nasarawa State
2Department of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering, University of Agriculture, Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2015 12:1424-1429
Received: September 3, 2015 | Accepted: September 3, 2015 | Published: December 25, 2015
Abstract
Force relaxation properties of a local variety of grapefruit (Lemuntaba) was determined under quasi-static compression loading using Instron UTM at three levels of time after harvest (freshly harvested, 7 days and 14 days after harvest) and three rates of loading (10, 5, 1 mm/s) for freshly harvested and 10 mm/s for one and two weeks after harvest. Fitting the obtained data for freshly harvested, loaded at 10 mm/s to a three-term Maxwell model; the resulted model equation was of F(t) = 743.521e-t/1.843+592.817e-t/0.007+474.254e-t/0.008, R2 = 0.97. For freshly harvested loaded at 10 mm/s, the force relaxed (decayed) from an initial value of 2435.647 N to 743.521 N; about 69.473% in 1.834 s; Similar phenomenon was observed for other treatments. From the results, it can be deduced that when this cultivar is loaded with about 65% of the total force at rupture, about 69% of the imposed load will be dissipated upon removal of that in about 1.8 s; an evidence of high elasticity.
Keywords:
Decay modulus, force, grapefruit (lemuntaba), relaxation, relaxation time,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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