Design, Development and Performance Evaluation of Foot Operated Elephant Apple Core Cutter

Abstract

Elephant apple has been found to contain various medicinal and pharmacological properties but due to limited processing technique its utilization is limited. This study was conducted with the objective of developing a mechanized foot operated elephant apple core cutter with an ergonomic design to reduce stress and require minimum amount of strain. The cutter was designed and developed by considering the physical properties of elephant apple where the core cutting is accomplished by mechanical coring of the elephant apple placed in a horizontal plane. The cutter consists of four unit’s viz. frame, cutting base, coring unit, and pressing unit. The cutting base and coring unit contacting elephant apple are made of food-grade stainless steel. Mechanized cutter performance has been evaluated in terms of capacity, machine efficiency, and loss percentage, etc. and was compared to that of the conventional cutting method. The average cutting capacity of mechanized core cutter (MCC) was about 115–130 kg/h compared to that of conventional method with 13–17 kg/h. The mechanized cutter also offered higher sepal yield (85.55 ± 1.81%) compared to the conventional method (64.23 ± 2.43%) indicating the overall performance of the mechanized cutter to be far better than conventional method in terms of quality, quantity and stress involved. This cutter proved to be ergonomically sound, less likely to cause muscle strain, and consistent with the users’ desired position.