Design, fabrication and evaluation of Jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus, Lam.) seed sheller

Abstract

Jackfruit seed endosperm has been used to create several food products.  However, raw jackfruit seeds are covered with hard covering making it difficult to remove the shell manually.  Manual seeding is uneconomical because of the sheer volume of jackfruit seeds produced during the production of vacuum-fried jackfruit. The jackfruit shelling machine performance was rated according to shelling capacity, shelling efficiency, percentage seed injury, and percentage separator loss. The fabricated jackfruit seed sheller has a smooth feeding performance, no unpleasant mechanical vibration, and tolerable level of blower noise.  Shelling efficiency was highly correlated with drying time for both raw and frozen seeds.  Shelling efficiency of the machine feed with dried raw seeds using single pass shelling is best at 57%, while 59% for frozen seeds, when both were dried for 15 hours.  Shelling capacity of the machine using frozen seeds increases with longer drying period unlike raw seeds that is more or less constant.  The average capacity of the sheller is around 390 – 420 kg-hr-1 of raw seeds and 251 kg-hr-1 to 532 kg-hr-1 of shelled seeds for frozen seeds. Seeds that were frozen prior to drying attained the highest shelling capacity when dried for 9.0 hours at 528 kg-hr-1 and is 20% higher than dried raw seeds at 420 kg-hr-1. In addition, losses and injuries were only recorded for seeds dried for not more than 3 hours (frozen) and 6 hours (raw) at 2.75% and 5.96%, respectively.