A pneumatic assisted electronically controlled continuous aonla seed removing machine

Abstract

A continuous flow aonla (Emblica officinalis) seed removing equipment which consists of a fruit platform, a punching plunger, a plunger driving mechanism, a conveying system, and an electronic control unit has been developed for the removal of seed from aonla fruit.  The machine was evaluated with three different plungers viz. sharp edge, hollow cutting edge, and star cutting edge in different orientation of fruit with three varieties of aonla with variable sized fruits.  The study indicated that the effectiveness of the machine and the percentage fruit pulp wastage varied with the size of fruit.  The highest effectiveness of the machine was observed as 93.94±0.42% with the combination of the apex end punching with hollow edge plunger in set A for NA-7a whereas Kanchan, Chakiya and NA-7b recorded higher effectiveness of 94.47±1.22%, 95.15±0.33% and 94.14±0.49% respectively in set B.  The percentage pulp wastage was 4.05±0.96%, 3.22±0.20%, 3.59±0.43% and 3.93±0.12% for Kanchan, Chakiya, NA-7a and NA-7b, respectively.  The percentage juice wastage for Kanchan, Chakiya, NA-7a and NA-7b was 1.48±0.25%, 1.63±0.15%, 2.47±0.32%, and 1.92±0.61%, respectively.  The evaluation study concluded that apex end punching with 12 mm hollow cutting edge plunger with 15 mm bore platform would be suitable for the deseeding of aonla fruits having less than 35 mm size, while for the fruits having more than 35 mm size, plunger of 15 mm diameter with 18 mm bore platform would be suitable.  The capacity of the developed machine was 90 kg/h or 3000 fruits/h.  The cost of operation including the labor cost and depreciation was calculated to be Rs.0.14 per kg of fruits.

Keywords: aonla, aonla seed removing machine, deseeding, punching plunger, continuous seed removing, Indian gooseberry deseeding