Demystifying the Black Box: Improving Detection Limits

Abstract

One of six IDRC 17 Student award recipients, Ryan Lerud is in the PhD programme at Portland State University, being co-advised by Peter Moeck of the Physics Department and Shankar Rananavare of the Chemistry Department. Ryan has been using multivariate statistics to develop a NIR/Vis Portable Fruit Quality Meter as part of his Masters thesis and on-going internship with Felix Instruments, Camas, WA. In this article, Ryan discusses instrument design, the impact that design has on fluctuating temperature and voltage and the effect of the latter on model performance.