Novel Technique to Measure Moisture Content of Paddy and the Error Correction
The moisture content in agricultural products is very critical. The presence of moisture also affects the quality of agricultural products like rice, wheat, nuts etc. Moisture content in food grains should be reduced and made optimum value otherwise it would encourage fungi development. The development of fungus makes the grain useless. For measuring the capacitance of paddy grains, designed integrated circuit was interfaced with the PC. The arrangement used is a high precision impedance converter. It is a 12 bit frequency generator and 1 Mega samples / sec analog to digital converter. Frequency sweep can be done using the circuit. This converter is interfaced with PC to measure the capacitance of paddy. Initially ceramic capacitors of different values were used to check the designed circuit. Then using the designed circuit, capacitance of representative amount of samples was measured and calculated 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 slight variation in decimal points and the error was also corrected using Matlab.