Coconut Dehusking Machine By Using Bicycle

Mechanical Engineering

India is the world’s third largest producer of coconut after the Philippines and Indonesia. India alone accounts for about 70% of the world production of coir and coir products. The total output of coir and coir products in India is estimated to be around Rs.1500.00 crore including exports of Rs.350.00 crore. All the parts of coconut orchard such as coconut husk, shell, copra, coconut water are useful. Coconut husk is used in coir industry, shell as a fuel, copra as food, coconut water as nutritious liquid. There are many farm equipment’s and tools which are developed for the post harvesting operation of horticultural crops. The dehusking of a coconut is regarded as the most time consuming, tiring, and difficult operation to perform and involves much human drudgery. Many attempts has been done to perform coconut dehusking manually as well as mechanized. Dehusking with traditional hand tools like machete or a spike depends on the skill of worker and involves training. Nowadays there is shortage of such skilled workers. The mechanized or the power operated machines are developed to eliminate the drawbacks of manual tools. Such manual tools and machines are developed all over the world and a very few have become popular, rest got vanished due to their limitations. The reasons for the failure of these tools include unsatisfactory and incomplete dehusking, breakage of the coconut shell while dehusking, spoilage of useful coir, greater effort needed than manual methods, etc. This present work aims to design and develop a semiautomatic coconut dehusking machine with eliminating the above mentioned drawbacks of the existing tools and machines. The machine conceived shall have main parts like deshuking unit mounted on a frame with electric motor as a power source along with speed reducing unit. The dehusking unit shall have a pair of cylindrical rollers with tynes (cutting pins) on its surface. These rollers will rotate in opposite direction with different speeds so that the tynes will penetrate into the husk and tear it away from the shell. The proper tearing of husk from shell occurs when the coconut offers good mesh with the tynes and it depends on the depth of insertion of nut into rollers and profile of tynes. As coconuts varies considerably in size and shape there is a need of adjustment in distance between pair of rollers for desired depth of insertion.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.