DEVELOPMENT OF GRAVITY TYPE FRUIT SORTER

S. K. Rupnar, R. T. Jadhav, A. K. Rupnar

Abstract: Sorting of fruits and vegetables is one of the important post-harvest operation. Sorting is necessary step in marketing and processing of fruits as it fetches high price to the grower and improves packaging and handling losses during transportation. So keeping this all in mind manually operated gravity type fruit sorter was developed for small scale grading operation. The developed hand operated sorter was comprised of hopper, grading channel, and collecting unit. The developed sorter was evaluated for Tomato sorting as per standard test code. During actual testing the samples were collected from different grades at particular interval of time and analysis of these collected samples were carried out for determination of various parameters such as grading error, cutting damage, skinning damage and output capacity. The average grading efficiency was found to be 79.2 %. The overall performance of developed hand operated fruit sorter was found to be satisfactory for sorting of Tomato fruits and it can utilized for sorting of variety of other fruits. The total cost of sorter was ?.810 whereas an operational cost was about ?.56/h.

Keywords: Fruit Sorter, Design, Testing, Hand Operated, Sorting Etc.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2017.0601006