dc.description.abstract |
India is the largest producer of jackfruit followed by Bangladesh and
Thailand. Kerala, which lies in the southernmost part of Western Ghats, is well
known for its diversity in jackfruit with cultivated area of 90,225 ha and production
of 294 million fruits per year. Peeling, coring and bulb separation of jackfruit are time
consuming, causes drudgery and very tedium in manual operation. However, a major
chunk of the production is wasted due to lack of post-harvest technological
interventions, and hence jackfruit is considered as underutilized fruit. The present
study aims at development and evaluation of a jackfruit peeler cum corer machine.
The principle operation of the machine is, as the jackfruit rotates peeling was done
helically due to the linear motion of the blade from bottom to top. Similarly cutting-
coring operation was performed by screw mechanism which pressed the core
removing tool against the fruit and cut into four portion. Finally bulbs were separated
manually.
Performance evaluation of the machine was conducted in the laboratory to
optimize the speed of fruit holder (90, 120 and 150 rpm) and corer pulley (110, 130
and 150 rpm) with three size of jackfruit, by considering the minimum processing
time and bulb wastage with higher efficiency. The peeling operation at optimized
speed (90 rpm) showed minimum bulb wastage for small (7.85%), medium (7.24%)
and large (6.20%) sized fruits with high peeling efficiency of 85.27, 83.51 and
80.64% with a trend of increasing operational time of 38.24, 44.58 and 50.34 sec
respectively. Similarly coring operation at optimal speed (130 rpm) showed
processing time of 16.98, 22.39 and 24.83 sec and high coring efficiency of 92.85,
90.32 and 82.03% with bulb wastage of 10.337, 7.81 and 6.09% respectively. The
average power consumption of optimal operational speeds for medium size jackfruit
with load was found as 0.0149±0.0029 kWh/fruit whereas in without load condition
was found to be 0.0104±0.0007 kWh/fruit. As per the comparative study, the average
time taken for peeling, cutting-coring and bulb separation was more (28.8 min/fruit)
during manual operation and in case of mechanical operation it was only 13.3
min/fruit. The maximum throughput of machine was 37.5 kg/h, whereas in manual
operation 17.36 kg/h. The cost of the machine has been estimated as Rs. 46950/-. The
operational cost of the machine was Rs. 52.97/h whereas, in manual operation, it was
Rs. 47.5/h. The benefit-cost ratio of the developed machine was 2.32:1 and in case of
manual operation, it was 2.66:1. |
en_US |