Design and experimental investigation of a lemon cutting machine

Abstract

The aim of this research is to design, develop and test a lemon cutting machine for processing lemon fruits. A prototype is designed and developed to consist of four main parts. Firstly, a power transmission system is designed as a source of power for driving a mechanism to rotate a rotor and blades. Secondly, a suspension system is fabricated with a lockable wheel that is able to fix the machine during the operation process without moving. Thirdly, a feeder system is constructed to include a hole with an incline tray that assists the feeding of lemons into the machine. Finally, a cutting system is manufactured for slicing a lemon into 2 pieces based on shear force. The experimental investigation is performed by a comparative study between the developed machine and the cutting of lemons by manual labour. The results show that the lemon cutting machine can demonstrate the higher performance than that of manual cutting by 3.31 times. In addition, for the lemon cutting process, the machine can produce the high-quality product of 88.79 %. Moreover, the prediction of lemon shear stress provides the accuracy of 96.50 %.