Design and Development of Automated Coconut Dehusking and Crown Removal Machine

Abstract

This paper presents the design and analysis activities involved in developing an automated coconut de-husking and coconut crown removal machine. The main purpose of this machine is to eliminate the skilled operator involved in de-husking the coconut and to completely automate the dehusking and crown removing process. Although coconut dehusking machines have already been demonstrated in the work [1,3,4] and also in some small scale industries, the process is either manual or semiautomatic. A completely automated machine with manual loading and unloading of coconuts will yield productivity higher than the existing process. Because of that, the current work is mainly focused on an automated machine for dehusking and crown removing. Also, we can yield lot of useful and commercial products from coconut at various stages of its lifecycle [5]. One of the important products is Copra which is the dried meat or kernel of the coconut used to extract coconut oil. So, the machine aims at de-husking and removing the crown of the de-husked coconut of various sizes across the world. In order to get to know about the different sizes of the coconut, various places across India has been visited where exuberant yielding of coconuts are made. Also, dimensional data of coconuts have been collected in some of the other most eminent countries where prominent coconut cultivations are done.

Based on the survey the maximum and minimum sizes of the coconut are determined. The machine is designed to accommodate different sizes of the coconut that are cultivated anywhere in the world. Also, various experiments have been conducted on both dry and mature coconuts in order to determine the force required to de-husk the coconut. The proposed experiments have been conducted on a standard Universal Testing Machine.