A Review on Moisture Measurement Technique in Agricultural Silos

Abstract

Moisture content (MC) is that the weight of water contained in paddy and other grans expressed in percent. Moisture content is typically mentioned the wet basis which means the whole weight of the grain including the water (MCwb). Accurate MC testing is very important in managing and selling paddy and rice because depending on the aim rice has completely different ideal MC. Inaccurate MC measurements lead to lower head rice once milled at wrong moisture content, additional drying cost and loss of quality if paddy is dried too much, spoilage if the grain is just too wet in storage, additional drying cost and harvesting loss if paddy is harvested wetter than necessary and Weight loss (loss in profit) if grain is sold too dry. This paper intends to review the available techniques of moisture content measurements, its principles and sources of inaccuracies. Relevant properties of cereal grain also are studied with their impact on moisture content, temperature, density and humidity. There are several ways of grain moisture detection such as drying technique, resistance technique, capacitance technique, microwave technique, neutron technique, V/F Conversion, Ftir spectroscopic technique and Microcontroller technique. Current MC of grains are based-on sampling and individual single point measurement, so far, there is no available overall measurement of MC in silo, but by using tomography method can measurement MC in whole silo and investigate the efficiency and accuracy of localization of moisture distributions sensing in agricultural silo by using Gaussian algorithm.