Design and Construction of a motorized coconut scrapping machine

Abstract

Coconut is very important fruit due to its kernel meat, water and shell used for various purposes such as food , making oil and cosmetics production .The most important part of coconut is the kernel meat which is edible and from which most of the valuable coconut products are made.The kernel meat is scrapped out of the shell using traditional tools such as a knife which turns out to be time consuming, hectic, high risk of injury and has food safety issues. Motorized scrappers are employed but on a small scale and inaccessible because they are quite expensive and with low duty cycle. Therefore the design project was aimed at designing a low cost motorized coconut scrapper to ease and accelerate coconut processing.Data was collected and design requirements selected for which several design concepts were generated and the best selected for use. The best concept was designed for, fabricated and later tested for effectiveness. The machine evaluation indicated reduced kernel meat scrapping time, reduced manual effort involved, improved food safety, increased scrapping effectiveness, and minimized wastage and also produce fine scrapped coconut which is best for oil processing. It was concluded that further research and design of coconut processing machines would accelerated coconut production that would later on pull in more income and hence development especially to the agricultural sector