۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Design

۳٫ Discussion

۴٫ Conclusions

References

Egg candling analysis is a process that consists in applying light to an egg in order to detect abnormalities inside it. The light makes the eggshell transparent; hence it is possible to analyze the components inside the eggs in a non-destructive procedure. Manual egg candling is time consuming and pays a toll in workers’ health. It is mainly prevalent in small and medium business in developing countries. The following work describes the design of an egg candling device for a poultry factory in Ecuador. The device consists of a conveyor belt with a chamber for classification. The conveyor belt was designed to allow a cold light to illuminate the eggs inside the analysis chamber. Defective eggs were separated using a mechanism which softly pushes the abnormal samples to the center of the conveyor belt. The analysis and decision making was done by a software developed in MatLAB using digital image processing. Additionally, the software enables the worker to operate the device and classify the eggs by himself in manual mode. As a result, 1000 samples were analyzed and classified with a process effectiveness of 95%.

Introduction

Egg candling is a process that consists in applying a strong light against an egg in order to detect abnormalities such as fertilized eggs, blood stains, spots, cracks, dirt (Ragni, Cevoli, & Berardinelli, 2010). Moreover, this process classifies the eggs in different grades (FAO, 2002) (Liu, Ter Hsin Chen, & Tan, 2017). In this process, the egg’s internal elements are examined. For this reason, it is necessary to consider an analysis beyond superficial vision (Abdullah, Nashat, Anwar, & Abdullah, 2017). Thus, the usage of a bright light in a dark room penetrates the egg’s shell which makes it transparent and possible to view the internal components of the eggs (Arivazhagan, Shebiah, Sudharsan, Kannan, & Ramesh, 2013). It is a non-destructive selection method and a quality control process for determining the grade of an egg and also for removing eggs with defects from the supply chain (United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 2000). This process was performed before using candles as a source of light, therefore its name nowadays. Table 1 shows pictures of common defects detected in eggs by the candling analysis.