Design, construction and evaluation of an abrasive blasting system for cleaning of orange peel pests

Annually, Chaff scale (Aonidiella orientalis) caused to damage of citrus orchards and reducing the marketability of products. Farmers have been attempted to eliminate this pest from citrus peel without using water. Therefore, this research conducted to design, construction and evaluation of a prototype model of the sandblasting system for cleaning of chaff scale from orange peel surface. In this system, the mix of sand and high-pressure air are throwing on the surface of pestiferous fruit and cause to remove the pests from fruit peel. In order to evaluate the device performance, different levels of air pressure (2, 3.5 and 5 bar) and different average diameters of sand (0.5, 0.75 and 1 mm) was used for cleaning of orange samples. To evaluate pest cleaning quality, images of samples was captured before and after the sandblasting using a machine vision setup. Finally, the percent of cleaning of pests from the orange surface were analyzed in different treatments, using image processing technology. According to the statistical results, the system had the best cleaning performance in 0.75 mm sand average diameter and 3.5 bar spraying pressure, with an accuracy of 94.9 percent.