 And so for this several funding grants, we're going to focus a little bit on post harvesting, but for the MUB grant, we're going to design a harvesting system, you know, to bring fruit from the tree to the storage room. Okay, so for a post harvesting, after you take fruits, you know, from the farm, you need to, you know, disturb them, you also need to process them, like in, remove some grains, and do sanitation and raising, and then you put in a bucket, you weigh them, put in a bucket. So this is a disclaimer, so that's, this guy is in this station is to do the sanitation, and here is to do the raising, and then, you know, your fruit needs to weigh 25 pounds in the bucket, then see it put in the, you know, cool room here for future processing. So there's a little small video showing by, I don't know, you have, maybe you cannot hear the voice, not sure you can hear it or not. No, we can't hear it. You cannot, I don't know how to do it anyway, so this is a disclaimer, you know, so the fruits are coming in, they were the stems through this machine, this is designed by Terry Drum. Then your fruit will catch by a small bucket, then go to this sanitation station, so you can see there are three parts, one with the solution of sanitization, this is just clean water to raise them, and then you drain the water, then put it in a bucket, weigh them 25 pounds, see them, that's what he's talking about here in the video is about the whole process. Okay, so what are we missing here, right? We have different versions of these stemmers, if you look here, in the left part is designed by Terry, in the right side, there is a December designed by Elder Farms. So they use a little bit different method to remove the fruit, hope, I will not, please watch the video because you probably cannot hear them, anyway, so there's a link, you can go to see how it works, but generally, if you look at this, just shake them, you know, just stem the fruit from the branch, from the stems. Okay, I jump that, so again, we come back here, so I just want to see how this whole system is working, after this stem, the fruit, then you need to take it to this different station manually, and also, since there's a chemical handle, you know, you may have issues with health of the human, and they need a lot of labor, and especially when you weigh the fruit, you need to be careful, you know, you dip in one little bit by little, take a lot of time. So our work, our small project trying to, you know, make automation system, so replace this a bunch of people, so that's what we are doing, there's a little bit of automation I made, so you can see, this is from the stemmer, those are fruits, go to different buckets, just mimic, you know, this is a sanitation solution with the bucket, there's a whole lot of this solution, this is the clean water for reading the fruit, use the clean water, then you'll, the water, the fruit will, you know, extract from here, go to this bucket, so here is a deal, it can automatically measure it, it will dynamic real-time shooting the wheat, and when it reaches to 25 pounds, it will shut off the system, auger or whatever system that's, you know, allow you to change it to a new bucket, so this is the, then you'll print a label, it will include everything, like, you know, what time you process, and you know, where you process, who is the processor, how many today for you as a wine farmer, how much you process today, and what time, so this is a complete label, and you can put it on a bucket, then you can store it, so this is the whole system we want to do, we did a little bit of different system, we tried wine auger system, again this worked with Terry, so, and also we are currently trying a conveyor system, both system have their prune accounts, you know, so this is a little bit trying how we use this conveyor system, this is a small conveyor here, if you see underneath the this damper, when the fruit drops to the conveyor, the conveyor will take the fruit to the first bucket with the solution, just mimic, you know, you don't need to take the bucket, you know, manually, not a fruit can move automatically, you know, ideally we'll have a second layer, so go from this bucket to the second bucket, and then go to the steel, but we only test late, again you cannot hear the voice, but here is a video showing how they move up, you know, it is able to do that, we facing some of the challenge, like, you know, the berries always stick on this conveyor, and you know, the efficiency, we are trying to improve it, you know, in this year I hope we can test in a few, so okay, so the second I want Joe, take the lead, talk about the recent model we have developed to process use the auger system, okay, Joe. Hey, everybody, can you hear me all right? Hello? I can hear you. Yep, okay, awesome, so yeah, I'm Joe, I'm a graduate student right now, and I was an ag engineer, so I have kind of taken the lead on doing some prototyping, and I used to work with cotton seed, so I had managed and designed some screw conveyors before, and have been working on how to convey the elderberry through a system where it can automate the cleaning process and put the chlorine solution on that's required to sterilize the surface before one freezes or stores the berries, and I'm an extraction chemist now with some of my work, and elderberry has always intrigued me to some degree. Next slide please. So this was the first draft of the solution, so analogous to where the berries were dropping in from the conveyor would be our first container here, and that would be where you'd have the chlorine and the primary separation, so the elderberry is a very interesting fruit that in its ripe state is a health food, but in its unripe state it's got some of those cyanic acids, so things like amygdalin that break down into cyanide in the body, so you don't want the system to convey through those unripe berries, they are conveniently less dense than water, they float, a ripe berry will sink and an unripe berry that is poisonous will float, so the primary separation technique in the first tank both to rinse off and clean off any unwanted debris that came through in the harvest as well as the unripe berries is a column of water, the unripe solution and everything you don't want sits at the top and you can pull that off of the trash pump and then everything you do want sinks down into the bottom, but you're going to need a way to convey from the bottom into the next tank while leaving that chlorine solution behind, so you don't carry the chlorine all the way through. The way that this was devised was an air gap, think like your basic plumbing system, how you have a gap of air in the YouTube that allows you to have water and trap the system, so it's a conveyed system that works and you don't get all the gross smells, but you do get the ability to move everything through without the entire system being charged with water, so that's basically what we're doing. At the tank level if you can see in one of those containers the water is going to be at the level of that in the auger, as the auger conveys the water pulls up a little bit, but not enough to move into the next tank, so you're able to leave the chlorinated cleaning solution behind in the first tank while moving the fruit through to the next one. If 10% of the harvest stream is debris and unripe berries you can pull from that and leave 90% of the stuff moving through as the ripe and desired stuff. A second containment vessel is then required to move the rest, so if it's again at 90% sufficient you've now brought 99% of what you want through as opposed to having the 10% waste here, so you're able through two separations to get down to just the ripe berries at the end and nothing else. The control system is like he had mentioned a shutoff on that second auger, so it's attached to a scale, there's a scale in there, and it'll send a kill signal to that auger when it reaches the right weight, and then you one can pull the bucket up, set it into the freezer after putting the right labeling on it, put another bucket on, and hit start and it goes again, so berries can build up from the destemmer in the first tank without ever having a problem there, they get conveyed through the system, they get washed, they get cleaned, they get sanitized, and dry berries and no water gets put into the final containment for freezing. Next slide please. So here is this working, this is working with blueberries on the fact that they're fresh berries that have about the same surface strength, so if the auger is going to mush a blueberry it will mush an elderberry, I also if you've ever seen the plastic BBs called airsoft, those are about the right size as an elderberry, so testing was conducted with those as well in terms of making sure it moves the right size item, this is making sure it moves the right strength item and does not destroy the fruit. Next slide please. So taking you through the design process a little bit that the conveyor was what was tested last season and what everybody wanted to use, in all due respect the conveyor does not work, the berries stick to the conveyor, the berries are not conveyed very well, the conveyor manufacturers adamantly said you can't stick that in a water solution and run it for a steady state that after talking with conveyor design engineers they adamantly did not like throwing a conveyor controller and motor and driver in a liquid solution and that allowed me to turn to an auger based system that while it did effectively move fruit it would not be something that one could rely on in harvest and in true conditions and in the field, so it was not a foreseeable solution in that sense. Next slide please. So moved out to to an auger and how to auger the fruit up. Originally had this as kind of a ute bend where we had piping bends that allowed you to to move the fruit and to to move them up through the column and it worked with BBs but again there was a concern that it would cause too much pressure and you just rupture berries in the corner, so started to test and started to to move that angle and sweep that so instead of a 90 degree you now have a 45 degree and then you now have a system where the auger itself so with a screw conveyor you would love it to be flat screw conveyors work at at a much higher load and you can you can move a lot more material when they are flat but your capacity factor suffers as that angle increases in steepness but to combat the fact that moving a bunch of crushed fruit is not a useful endeavor we ended up actually having to sweep the the screw conveyor up at the end of this so the testing did not satisfy that. Next slide please. So here's originally what we what we tested and designed and we're looking at of how to pull debris off keep the air gap like we were talking about move the fruit through and while it was quite acceptable using a hardened infection molded plastic it was not acceptable for fruit so it did not satisfy the the working conditions once we moved to testing fruit so the the cool part about this kind of system is you can monitor and you can keep the the chlorine solution at a steady state so as opposed to having to stop production to test the chlorine and refresh everything with a trash pump pulling off of the side and a new clean like chlorine solution being dosed in you can maintain a level of chlorine in the tank as you're pulling out the the things you don't want so as chlorine is consumed because it is used and it coats the fruit and and it does the sanitization you're able to refresh it at the proper rate so the system can be a more of a fire and forget as opposed to a batch production kind of system conveniently all the other debris that you care about all of the stems all the other grime that that might be on a berry is also going to float for the most part as well so you're getting carried through that isn't ripe fruit next slide please so as we started to test um as i as i talked about a little bit as you sweep a screw conveyor up you lose a lot of capacity the higher that angle gets but you protect the fruit from from being destroyed due to to pressure in the bottom or sharp edges and and mitigating path length here so as one produces a longer screw conveyor if you if you think about as a helix so we've got a standard pitch on these so for every linear like inch of travel you've got the same kind of of pitching on these augers so you're sweeping around a cylinder so a foot long four inch auger so a four inch diameter auger is going to have three complete revolutions per foot and now you have a much longer path length than than you'd even expect and so the longer the path length the more potential damage to fruit as as it rolls along and and collides with itself with the walls with the auger with everything um next slide please so this was we saw the video of this running but this was the first prototype of being able to show that that fruit was conveiable in both the right size and the right strength to to move everything and and we sized an auger appropriate for this so below is the the basic calculations for screw conveyance that you've got the the pitch the diameter the uh capacity factor you've got how uh flowable the material is so elderberries are reasonably free flowing compared to something like a dust particulate which likes to compact or any of the surfactants that so i size screw conveyors for for seed treatments a lot and a lot of those um powders likes to compact instead of flowing and uh elderberry is much more pleasant to work with to be honest that despite the fragility it is it is quite a pleasant thing so we were able to safely run a low speed of about 50 rpms and a high speed of about 115 and in doing so even the four inch augers at 45 degrees with the right capacity factors could process up to 575 580 kilograms per hour a really well running team of five is potentially putting out about 250 kilograms an hour that 500 pounds per hour from from one of those teams is a good harvest team so even at our our low speeds our system is matching basically the capacity and the running rate that they are and is doing so with much fewer operator input that one guy hitting start and moving those buckets into the freezer could reasonably replicate what a team of five is doing next slide please we run out of time oh no two minutes so yeah um unfortunately a lot of fruit damage occurred that uh some of the worst trials were were 25 percent of the fruit becoming damaged i classified damaged as either bruised or ruptured skin so um a second prototype was necessary next slide please so i'm trying to to mitigate that at the moment so i'm reducing the the distance it's traveling i'm smoothing the auger out i have a more gentle angle that still works i have more of an open section and a bottom that funnels everything in and i've increased the water level relative so the air gap is much smaller in doing so i lose a little bit of operational um throughput capacity but hopefully mitigate fruit damage tremendously so this is this is my second iteration right now as we're going through and it worked decently well with with bbs it's moving everything nicely i have not tested it with with raw um right belterberry yet just because that is currently not in season but that's the next goal that's the next objective through this next slide please um everything additionally can be custom printed custom fabricated that none of the loads we're dealing with that all of the all of the shear rates all all of the mechanical strength required is well in the realm of what somebody could could fabricate by themselves on their kitchen table so parts are easy to replace and then to work with that we're not dealing with anything that requires significant machining next slide please um again we we interface so both terry and his system as well as uh dav bueller with elder farms they both have two systems uh the river hills one with terry is an xy plane agitation destemming where the entire thing shakes about and that knocks berries through the hole and that will will interface with what i've built as will the the rotary destemmer that uh dav and his team put together that they they both have pretty similar interfaces next slide please i guess there's a lot of slides okay yeah any questions all right just for the people in the room here there was one question in the chat about using different sanitizers in the system um that was answered that the different farms are experimenting with that so rather than using just the chlorine um because organic producers can't use chlorine in the wash system does anybody here in the room have a question um so the question was do they use sanidate the system they showed here was chlorine so i don't know what the other growers are using honestly you can dose any of the solutions it doesn't matter what you put in it chlorine is just the and it is industry standard for fruit like that so you can throw hydrogen peroxide in just fine that none of the none of the system would be damaged by using that as your cleaner instead of chlorine it's not really any more plastic and it's not going to cause any problems on the mechanical end