Novel Technique to Measure Moisture Content of Paddy and the Error Correction

Abstract

The moisture content in agricultural products is very critical. The presence of moisture alsoaffects the quality of agricultural products like rice, wheat, nuts etc. Moisture content in foodgrains should be reduced and made optimum value otherwise it would encourage fungidevelopment. The development of fungus makes the grain useless. For measuring thecapacitance of paddy grains, designed integrated circuit was interfaced with the PC. Thearrangement used is a high precision impedance converter. It is a 12 bit frequency generatorand 1 Mega samples / sec analog to digital converter. Frequency sweep can be done using thecircuit. This converter is interfaced with PC to measure the capacitance of paddy. Initiallyceramic capacitors of different values were used to check the designed circuit. Then using thedesigned circuit, capacitance of representative amount of samples was measured andcalculated the moisture content from the obtained readings. The technique is fast, simple,accurate and non-destructive method. Though the method is accurate, there is a slightvariation in decimal points and the error was also corrected using Matlab.