Improvement of Moisture Meters for Grain Legumes

The article presents a device for measuring the moisture content of leguminous crops based on a contact conduct-dielcometric sensor, represented by a multi-element equivalent circuit. It is proposed to introduce into the device, implemented on the microcontroller, a processing unit for an analog signal obtained from the output of the measuring circuit, carrying information on the values of the equivalent circuit parameters of the contact conduct-dielcometric sensor. Such a construction simplifies the circuit and allows creating stand-alone mobile moisture meters without using the processing of measurement results on a personal computer and without using specialized expensive software. A functional diagram of such a measuring device and experimental dependences of the parameters of the sensor equivalent circuit on the grain moisture are presented. The transformation equations for each parameter and moisture calculation, as well as the values of the errors obtained as a result of processing the experimental data are given. The advantages of the device are wide functionality and correction of additional errors.