Design, development and performance evaluation of elephant apple core cutter

Abstract

In this study a hand operated elephant apple cutter was developed and the machine parameters (capacity, machine efficiency, and loss percentage, etc.) were studied. The cost and performance of the designed cutter was compared to that of the traditional cutter. The comparative performance evaluation of the designed cutter with that of traditional method indicates that the cutter offered higher sepal yield (82.73 ± 1.5%) and capacity (100–120 kg h−1) than the traditional cutter offered sepal yield (63.01 ± 3.3.4%) and capacity (12–15 kg h−1) with uniform coring of the finished product. The cutter could process around 235–240 number of fruits against around 30–35 by traditional in a time period of 1 h. Core cutter can be used by the farmers or rural entrepreneurs for elephant apple processing and value addition for commercial and therapeutic applications.