Design and Fabrication of Garlic Peeler

Garlic is an important and economical plant. It has many uses in medicinal, culinary and ayurvedic purposes. Garlic peeling is a tedious, time consuming and laborious work. So far, traditional peeling methods are used for garlic peeling. These methods are observed to be unhygienic, laborious and caused high damage to garlic segments. Mechanical peelers available are costly and not affordable to small scale industries. Since, the traditional methods are laborious and mechanical methods are costly there is a need to develop low cost, mechanical peeler that will reduce the drudgery. Angular iron and flat iron was used for main frame and supporting the main units. A food grade rubber and mild steel pipe was used for rubber roller. Iron bar was used for shaft. A wire mesh was used as screen. Dimensions of garlic segments were measured using digital vernier callipers and weight of each garlic segment was measured using electronic balance. Moisture content, orthogonal dimensions, weight, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, equivalent mean diameter, shape factor, terminal velocity and drag coefficient of garlic segments were found. Moisture content of garlic segments was 59.36±0.87% (w.b). At this moisture content, average length, width and thickness of garlic segments were found to be 25.818 3.743 mm, 10.116 2.209 mm and 7.34 1.638 mm, respectively. Average weight of individual garlic segments were found to be 1.159 g. Geometric mean diameter, sphericity, equivalent mean diameter and shape factor of garlic segments were found out to be 12.422 mm, 0.481, 13.03 mm and 0.218, respectively. The terminal velocity and drag coefficient were 18.941 m/s and 0.416 at moisture content of 59.08 ± 0.82% (w.b.). Cost of peeler was estimated to be about ₹ 10,005/-.