Development and Performance Evaluation of a semi-automatic pineapple peeling machine

Abstract

Pineapple is one of the major fruit produced in India. The major problem related with the processing of pineapple is peeling. Peeling of pineapple manually is a time consuming, labour intensive process and causes drudgery, Therefore a simple, semi mechanical pineapple peeling machine which is easy to operate, maintain, and economical was fabricated. The peeler removes the peel effectively and makes the further processing easy. The equipment consist of mainly three parts two motors, cutting blade and diameter adjustment system. One motor of 300 rpm and12v which control the movement of blade and another of 500 rpm and 12v used to rotate pineapple. The wedge shaped cutting blade made from stainless steel square pipe having 0.1mm thickness, 4mm length and 2mm width. The blade is attached to diameter adjustment system which facilitates the movement of blade according to shape of pineapple. The simultaneous movement of two motors helps in rotation of pineapple and upward and downward movement of blade, respectively.This results in peeling of pineapple. The designed pineapple peeler also proved to have a high efficiency (99.3%) with less material loss (1.69%) and capacity about 305.5kg/hr.