Abstract
Effective gas flow between plant materials and their surrounding atmosphere is necessary to enable controlled atmospheres to act on stored produce and maintain produce quality. Gas flow can be motivated in two ways: by component gas concentration (i.e. partial pressure) gradients and by total as pressure gradients. Varying the total gas pressure about stored plant material should cause gas flow which supplements that induced by concentration gradients alone. Novel measurement techniques were developed to explore the effects of varying atmospheric pressure and gas composition on gas transfer rates. In apple fruit, gas transfer rate undergoes a several-fold increase with small pressure fluctuations. There is a direct increase in gas transfer rate as the amplitude of pressure variation increases, and optimum periods of oscillation fall in the range of 20 to 60 seconds. Apples, onions, and other commodities with large internal gas volume and intermediate peripheral resistance to bulk gas flow, seem to be most responsive to total pressure variation.
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