Design of a capacitive sensor for oil palm fresh fruit bunch maturity grading

Automatic grading of oil palm fresh fruit bunch is desired. In this study, a capacitive sensing system was designed and developed for the purpose of grading oil palm fresh fruit bunch. In this method, oil palm fresh fruit bunch placed between capacitive plates as a dielectric material and then measure the resulting capacitance voltage. Experiments were carried out using oil palm bunches of Tenera variety. Ripe and unripe mature bunches tested with 100 kHz sinusoidal frequencies. Correlation of capacitive response observed to be linear to bunch weight and negative linear to bunch ripeness. This result suggest that this method be explored for automatic grading of oil palm fresh fruit bunch.