Sweet cherry is extremely susceptible to collision damage during post-harvest handling. Fruit-to-rigid surface and fruit-to-fruit collision systems were modeled by the dynamic FE method and the sweet cherry model included three parts: exocarp, mesocarp, and pit. A fruit-to-rigid surface horizontal collision testbed was newly developed to validate the prediction accuracy of the fruit FE model. It was found that the fruit model inputting the average elastic moduli and failure stress of the fruit tissues can reproduce the experimental maximum impact force and contact time in the compression stage with the relative error of 1.58 and 1.87%, respectively. Three mathematical models were proven to be capable of quantitatively assessing the internal damage degree of sweet cherry by three independent variables: collision type, initial fruit velocity, and environment temperature. This study shows an effective numerical simulation approach for objectively predicting the horizontal collision-damage susceptibility of sweet cherry and other fresh fruit in postharvest damage-prevention strategy analysis.

Keywords