Egg Candling Analysis Equipment Design: A Safety Solution

Egg candling analysis is a process that consists in applying light to an egg in order to detect abnormalities inside it. The light makes the eggshell transparent; hence it is possible to analyze the components inside the eggs in a non-destructive procedure. Manual egg candling is time consuming and pays a toll in workers’ health. It is mainly prevalent in small and medium business in developing countries. The following work describes the design of an egg candling device for a poultry factory in Ecuador. The device consists of a conveyor belt with a chamber for classification. The conveyor belt was designed to allow a cold light to illuminate the eggs inside the analysis chamber. Defective eggs were separated using a mechanism which softly pushes the abnormal samples to the center of the conveyor belt. The analysis and decision making was done by a software developed in MatLAB using digital image processing. Additionally, the software enables the worker to operate the device and classify the eggs by himself in manual mode. As a result, 1000 samples were analyzed and classified with a process effectiveness of 95%.