DEVELOPMENT OF A GARLIC ROOT AND STEM CUTTING MACHINE

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assoc. Prof., Ag. Eng. Dept., Fac. of Agric., Cairo University., Egypt

2 Water relations and field irrigation Dept., Agric. and Biolog. Research Division, National Research Center, Egypt

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to design a garlic root and stem cutting machine suitable for cutting root and stem part of the garlic. It can help farmer to reduce human effort and degree of discomfort involved during cutting. A garlic cutting machine was designed, fabricated and evaluated for its performance and techno-economic feasibility. Some shearing properties of garlic stem that are pertinent to the mechanical processing were measured and considered in the design of the machine. The developed machine was evaluated at three levels of knife speed (KS) (8.5, 12.1 and 20.5 m s-1) and two levels of garlic bulb moisture content (MC) (61.5% and 70.3% w.b.). The Evaluation was based on the following parameters: machine capacity (Pm), bulb damage (BD), consumed energy (CE) and cost. The results recommended operating the machine at combinations of KS = 8.5→20.5 m s-1 and MC value of 61.5% to maximize Pm with minimize BD. The garlic cutting machine increased the capacity to about 1.5 times and reduced the cutting cost to about 29.2 % comparing with manual method.

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Main Subjects

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