Chironji nut decorticator developed by IGKV, Raipur, India

Abstract

The kernel contains the nuts of chironji. Traditionally, it was removed by hand hammer, small stone or some locally available stone chakki (Jatta). These methods are very tedious, laborious and uneconomical to the farmers and result in low quality products with higher broken kernels. To overcome this problem in processing of nut, IGKV, Raipur, design and developed a chironji nut decorticator, to remove outer shell from the nuts to get whole kernels. The machine comprises of feed hopper, cylindrical housing, decortications unit, main frame, electric motor, grader, sieve etc. Results showed that the efficiency of machine was found to be 93.90 % and capacity was 32.82 kg/h. The whole kernels and broken percentage was obtained at 16% and 2%, respectively. The machine is most useful to the small farmers, small entrepreneurs, self help group, tribal group etc. who are involved in decortications of chironji nut. In this method the cost of operation and time required to decorticate is very less as compared to traditional method.

Development of a decorticator for Buchanania lanzan nuts and its process optimization

“…The highest decortication efficiency (96.10%) was obtained when sand roasted nuts (having moisture content 7%) fed to cylinder rotating at the speed of 300 rpm and the concave clearance of 8 mm (Figure 2). The whole kernel recovery was 12.60%, that is, 56.71% of kernels which was at par with Pradhan and Pradhan (2020) and more than the decorticator developed by Singh et al (2016) and Nishad et al (2018). During sand roasting, moisture evaporated from the surface of the nuts leaving hairline cracks which facilitated decortications and returned more efficiency and less damage to kernel.…”

“…The available decorticators have very low decortication efficiency (Pradhan, Abdullah, & Pradhan, 2020b;Singh et al, 2016). The manual and mechanical decortications also have very less whole kernel recovery, that is, less than 20% of total kernel (Nishad, Patel, Naik, & Mishra, 2018). The damage to kernels results in not only excessive economical loss but also nutrition losses (Shelare, Kumar, & Khope, 2019).…”