A Basic Study on Nondestructive Evaluation of Potatoes Using Ultrasound

This paper presents the acoustic properties of potatoes measured by the pulse transmission method with longitudinal ultrasonic waves in a frequency range of 50 kHz to 1 MHz. The average ultrasonic velocity has been measured to be 824 m/s at 100 kHz and the attenuation coefficient is approximately proportional to f 1.4 , where f is frequency. The attenuation for defective potatoes is measured to be much higher than that for normal ones. Therefore, it is suggested that defective potatoes can be detected by attenuation measurements of longitudinal ultrasonic waves.