INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background Study
Harumanis mango is one of the tropical fruits and is included in the family of mangoes or their scientific name is Mangifera Indica Linn. It is known for its thick green skin and it have a golden flesh, soft, no fiber, and not contained much water in it and have an exotic taste. Harumanis mango is grown in Probolinggo, East Java, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Malaysia, Harumanis mango is only can be found in the state of Perlis because of the weather condition that considered optimal for good Harumanis mango production which is long dry weather during the blooming period. Figure 1.1 below shows the climate changes in Perlis, Malaysia. The level of water in the net forcing is shown in Figure below which is VH stand for very high, H stand for high, M stand for medium, L stand for low and VL stand for very low of water level (Stocker et al., 2013).
Figure 1.1 : The water cycle of climate changes in Perlis, Malaysia (Mahmad Nor et al., 2013)
Each year Harumanis mango harvesting season was only for just a month or a month and a half, which was from April to …show more content…
The mangoes are wrapped in the plastic or the paper cover to protect them from insects and excessive solar burn. Therefore, the measurement of the mango size (diameter of the mango) are difficult to be performed as the mango are covered with the plastic or paper cover and they need to remove the paper or plastic cover first before measuring the fruit diameter and they need to recovered the fruit.
Thus, the aim of this project was to assess an alternative technique to measure the Harumanis mango weight over time using a portable mass balance. This method was the improvement of the fruit diameter measuring method as they no need to unwrap and wrap back the fruits to do the measurements. Based on this finding, the harvest Harumanis mango weight from fruit weight measured were