Author(s): S. K. SWAIN, J. P.GUPTA AND P. K. SAHOO

Abstract: The present study aims at the development of a semi-automatic cashew nut shelter suitable for the drum roasted cashew nuts incorporating a new shelling mechanism adopting the principle of impulse and tension. This mechanism comprises of a set of seven numbers of chisel shaped pins and a set of five numbers of conical shaped pins through which the impulse and tensile forces were applied simultaneously to crack the nut and release the whole kernel intact. The performance of this shelter was evaluated with three different sizes of nuts at 10.73% moisture content. The result on performance evaluation of the power operated shelter indicated that the shelling capacity was found to vary from 14.44 nuts/min to 14.67 nuts/min with whole kernel recovery varying from 86.92% to 93.67% and the shelling efficiency varying from 86.17% to 88.61%. The result on half split percentage and broken percentage was found to be varying from 5.46% to 6.00% and from 4.00% to 6.92% respectively. On comparison, in the conventional method the average shelling capacity was observed to be 9.74 nuts/min with 86.27% whole kernel recovery, 7.33% half splitted nuts and 6.53% brokens. The cost of operation of the power shelter was found to be Rs 3.10/kg as compared to Rs 3.48/kg in case of the conventional hand beating method The overall performance of this shelter was found to be satisfactory as compared to the conventional method of shelling drum roasted cashew nuts. However, this shelter can be further modified incorporating an automatic feeding system to place cashew nuts in desired orientation for further enhancement of the shelling capacity with simultaneous reduction in drudgery of working and cost of shelling.

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