Development of weight grader for dehusked coconut

Abstract

Manual grading of dehusked coconut often leads to low profit than expected by the farmers. Appropriate grading systems guarantee a better income for the coconut growers. Therefore, a simple machine was designed and developed to grade the de-husked coconut based on its weight. The developed grader consists of an electronic weighing assembly, carrier cups with four bar linkage mechanism, proximity sensor, pneumatic actuators, and drive mechanism. Before the fabrication of grader, the tilt angle of carrier cup mechanism was optimised to ensure a free falling behaviour of dehusked coconut. The performance test of weight grader was conducted by varying the angular velocities of carrier cups (12, 14 and 16 rad/min) and signal settling time of the load cell (2, 3 and 4 s). The highest grading efficiency of 84 % was obtained at an angular velocity of 16 rad/min and load cell settling time of 4 s. The developed weight grader can replace the manual grading system by fetching more income and also it is user-friendly to the coconut growers