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.
