Development and Fabrication of Small Capacity Garlic Peeler

Abstract

Garlic (Allium sativum L.) is one of the most perennial bulb crops of Liliaceae family. It is widely used as a condiment and for medicinal and pharmaceutical preparations. Traditional methods of garlic peeling are laborious, time and cost intensive. The present study was undertaken to develop and evaluate the performance of small capacity garlic peeler so as to overcome the time consumption and cost intensiveness. Engineering properties of garlic relevant to peeler development were identified and measured. It worked on the abrasion principle with very little damage to the cloves after peeling. The peeler was analyzed for its performance at different roller speeds and pretreatment conditions. An evaluation of the performance of the developed peeler with hot air pretreated cloves indicated that it recovered 39.40% of peeled cloves after peeling at 400 rpm of roller speed. For the control samples, maximum peeled clove recovery was 33.45%. The capacity of the machine was found to be 15 kg/h. The maximum peeling efficiency observed was 48.13% with hot air pretreated samples peeled at 400 rpm of roller speed. An economic analysis indicated that the developed garlic peeler could be profitably used for the small scale peeling operations.