In some important berry-producing countries, such as Chile, the fruit is harvested manually. The markets for these products are generally very distant, and any damage caused to the fruit during harvesting will be expressed in its shelf life. The first step to understanding the harvesting process is to identify what happens to the harvest baskets in each stage (picking, wait-full, transport-full, freezing tunnel, emptying and transport-empty), allowing variables that can affect the shelf life to be identified. This article proposes the use of Smartbins, intelligent harvest baskets with sensors to collect weight, temperature, and vibration data. Combined analysis of the variables collected, using machine learning algorithms, allows the system to estimate which stage the basket is at with an accuracy of 80%, and to assess whether the fruit has been exposed to situations that could affect its shelf life. Due to imbalance characteristics of the data collected, the best results were obtained in longer stages (picking and wait-full stages with 89% and 86% respectively).

This paper describes in detail an automatic laboratory scale (50 L) batch packed column distillation system, which has been assembled at the Department of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The system includes real-time monitoring of temperatures (in different parts of the system), alcoholic strength, flow rates and heating power. In addition, this system allows manipulating the flow rate of the cooling water in the partial condenser and the heating power in the boiler. Data acquisition and control strategies were developed in LabVIEW ^® environment. The system allows developing and managing strategies to control several variables, such as distillate alcohol strength, specific temperatures and heating and cooling rates.

Mountain papaya fruits (Vasconcella pubescens) were tested for firmness with a nondestructive acoustic method for 14 days after harvest. The response of each fruit was analyzed with the Fourier transform to obtain a firmness index (FI) based on the second resonant frequency and with the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to obtain a spectrogram frequency centroid (FC) index. The indexes were processed with a support vector machine (SVM) learning procedure in which days since harvest was taken as the basic truth of ripeness which the measured indexes attempt to estimate. The analysis of the results demonstrate that different groupings of the days into classes to be estimated give widely varying recognition rates and that the best rates are obtained when the classes are delimited using prior knowledge.