Effect of egg freshness on their automatic orientation

BACKGROUND High quality eggs in unified packaging are desired by egg production enterprises. Automatic orientation apparatus is frequently used to orient eggs uniformly to pointed-end-down position for packaging. However, such apparatus may not work accordingly if the eggs are stored under improper ways or excessive storage time. To study the effect of egg freshness on the efficiency of automatic orientation process, the relationship between egg freshness and its orientation motions was investigated under different storage conditions. RESULTS The results showed that as the storage time increased, centroid position and pointed-end-down turnover ratio (TR) decreased, other parameters such as eggs’ obliquity at stationary state, horizontal deflection angle, speed, acceleration of axial motion, side-slip angle and rolling distance increased. However, the effects of storage time on the guiding distance of the guide rod were not apparent. In addition, the higher the storage temperature, the greater the changes of the final orientation states of eggs on the conveyor line. If the eggs were to be oriented uniformly, they should be stored for less than 25, 16, 10 and 7 days at 10 °C, 18 °C, 26 °C and 34 °C respectively under the relative humidity of 75%. CONCLUSION The experimental results presented in this paper are very useful for quality control and quality assurance in egg production enterprises.