REFINEMENT AND PERFREMANCE EVALUATION OF EXISTING JACKFRUIT PEELER, CORER CUM CUTTING MACHINE

Abstract

Jackfruit is one of the major fruits produced in India. The jackfruit is the national fruit of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the state fruit of the Indian states, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The Government of Kerala declared jackfruit as official state fruit. The traditional method of peeling and coring of jackfruit is done by cutting manually, which is a time-consuming, labour-intensive process and causes drudgery. Therefore, development of a mechanical tool or machine for peeling, coring and cutting of whole jackfruit will reduce the wastage of major quantity of jackfruit and maximum utilization of the fruit. A similar jackfruit peeler cum corer was developed at K.C.A.E.T., Tavanur. However, it has less efficiency and capacity because of the single motor and was also time consuming. So, to improve the capacity and reduce the total processing time, some modifications are done to the existing machine. The main parts of the machine are fruit holder, peeler assembly, corer assembly along with cutting mechanism, power transmission unit and frame assembly. The modified equipment was found to be semi-automatic, consisting of mainly two motors in which one is connected to fruit holder and peeler and the other with cutting-coring operation. The modified machine has an overall capacity of 218.39 kg/hr (without time lag) and 105.17 kg/hr (with time lag). The average time taken for peeling, coring and cutting was 28.8 min/fruit in manual operation and in case of mechanical operation, it was 2.69 min/fruit which is lesser than manual operation. This indicated that the developed machine aids in faster peeling and cutting of jackfruits with least drudgery and also could be used in small and medium scale jackfruit processing industries.