STUDY AND OPTIMIZATION OF OPERATIONAL PARAMETERS OF AUTOMATIC CASHEW SHELLER FOR IMPROVED SHELLING
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Date
11-08-12
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University of Agricultural Sciences GKVK, Bangalore
Abstract
Cashew (Anacardium occidentale L.) is a tropical tree which
provides a kidney shaped nut called as “cashew nut” that is consumed
all over the world. Cashew nuts are nutritious and tasty. The shelling of
nuts is a laborious process mostly done in rural areas of Kerala,
Maharashatra and Karnataka. The manual shelling process is tedious,
time consuming and labour intensive. To address this, different pretreatments
were conducted on raw cashew nuts and the performance of
an automatic cashew nut sheller was evaluated. Studies were conducted
to determine the physical properties and the effect of pre-treatments on
the shelling of the cashew nuts. The nuts were graded as small, medium
and ungraded. The pre-treatments consisted of steaming the nuts at
different pressures (0.0, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 kg/cm2) for different
durations (15, 20, 25, 30 and 35 min). The results indicated that lower
cutting force is required for shelling the pre-treated nuts compared to the
raw nuts. The shelling efficiency was found to be highest (80.66%) in
ungraded nuts for a pre-treatment of 1.5 kg/cm2 pressure for 30
minutes. The whole kernel recovery was highest (96.21%) in medium
nuts for a pre-treatment of 0.0 kg/cm2 pressure for 25 minutes. The
Cost-benefit ratio was found to be 1:1.57 for the Automatic Cashew
Sheller.