UCD School of Biosystems Engineering

Dr Di Wu from UCD School of Biosystems Engineering received the prestigious CIGR Armand BLANC Prize for his paper entitled “Non-destructive Texture Analysis of Farmed Salmon Using Hyperspectral Imaging Technique” at the 3rd CIGR International Conference of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR-AgEng2012), held on 8-12 July 2012 in Valencia, Spain.

The CIGR Armand BLANC Prize is given to young authors (under 30 years) for presentation of outstanding papers. In the paper, coauthored with Mr Hongju He, PhD student funded under UCD-CSC scheme and Professor Da-Wen Sun, Di evaluated the feasibility of hyperspectral imaging system coupled with multivariate analysis for non-destructively assessing texture of salmon fillets. Quantitative models were successfully established between spectral signatures of samples and their corresponding TPA parameters, namely hardness, cohesiveness, and adhesiveness. The proposed method provides a rapid, contact-free, and consistent evaluation tool that can be used as a reliable alternative to traditional universal testing machines for texture of salmon fillet.

Dr Di Wu is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow under the mentoring of Professor Da-Wen Sun. This study is part of his postdoctoral project which was ranked as No. 1 among the 46 applications by IRCSET Assessment Panel in Engineering. Di’s attendance to the Conference was funded under the UCD Seed Funding Scheme (2012).

CIGR (http://www.cigr.org), the International Commission of Agricultural Engineering and Biosystems Engineering, established in 1930, is the world largest international agricultural and biological engineering organization, and CIGR International Conference which is held every four years is one of the biggest events in the field worldwide. The Conference offered a wide range of topics for presentations on agricultural and biosystems engineering subjects and attracted more than 1600 abstracts from over 60 countries.