Abstract
Quality control and monitoring of perishable goods during transportation and delivery services is an increasing concern for producers, suppliers, transport decision makers and consumers. The major challenge is to ensure a continuous ‘cold chain’ from producer to consumer in order to guaranty prime condition of goods. In this framework, the suitability of ZigBee protocol for monitoring refrigerated transportation has been proposed by several authors. However, up to date there was not any experimental work performed under real conditions. Thus, the main objective of our experiment was to test wireless sensor motes based in the ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 protocol during a real shipment. The experiment was conducted in a refrigerated truck traveling through two countries (Spain and France) which means a journey of 1,051 kilometers. The paper illustrates the great potential of this type of motes, providing information about several parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, door openings and truck stops. Psychrometric charts have also been developed for improving the knowledge about water loss and condensation on the product during shipments.
Highlights
Perishable food products such as vegetables, fruit, meat or fish require refrigerated transportation.For all these products, Temperature (T) is the most important factor for extending shelf life, being essential to ensure that temperatures along the cold chain are adequate
The results showed that there was a significant temperature variability both spatially across the width of the container as well as temporally along the trip, and that it was out of the specification more than 30% of the time
Only motes 3 and 4 were able to transmit to the coordinator
Summary
Perishable food products such as vegetables, fruit, meat or fish require refrigerated transportation.For all these products, Temperature (T) is the most important factor for extending shelf life, being essential to ensure that temperatures along the cold chain are adequate. Perishable food products such as vegetables, fruit, meat or fish require refrigerated transportation. The results showed that there was a significant temperature variability both spatially across the width of the container as well as temporally along the trip, and that it was out of the specification more than 30% of the time. In those experiments monitoring was achieved by means of the installation of hundreds of wired sensors in a single container, which makes this system architecture commercially unfeasible [1,7]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
