Design and Fabrication of a Flexible Ultrasonic Transducer for Egg Quality Evaluation

Haugh unit (HU) measurement is a destructive-based and time-consuming method commonly used in Republic of Korea to evaluate egg freshness, and all eggs are usually not evaluated. To overcome these limitations, ultrasonic testing technique has been recently applied to evaluate egg quality owing to its rapid, safe, and cost-effective features. However, it has not been widely applied in the poultry industry as of now. Therefore, in the present study, an ultrasonic transducer (UT), which can effectively transmit and receive elastic energy on egg shell, was designed and fabricated to prevent ultrasonic energy loss between egg shell and UT. To accomplish this, the optimal design parameters for developing UT were analyzed and the result obtained. Among them, a flexible front matching layer was selected as the most important design parameter for egg quality evaluation, and the detailed specification of the UT was obtained. The performance of traditional and newly developed UT was compared, and the newly developed UT demonstrated a much higher sensitivity than the traditional UT. Therefore, the newly developed UT can be used as a promising tool for egg quality evaluation based on ultrasonic testing method.