Abstract:
Bruises occur during harvesting, handling, grading, and transporting. The conditions necessary for pears to possess a high resistance to bruising remain unknown. It would be useful to know the variability of pear bruise resistance in relation to dropping height, mass, firmness and location around the fruit. The effects of dropping height, mass, firmness, fruit dropping orientation on bruise volume and various impact parameters (contact time, time to peak force, peak force, F/T) were determined for pears. Most of the impact parameters changed with dropping height, mass and firmness of fruit. The bruise volume could be predicted by multiple regression model based on dropping height, mass and firmness of pear.