DEVELOPMENT OF TOOL AND MACHINE FOR SAFE SEPARATION OF ARILS FROM POMEGRANATE

Pomegranate has been regarded as medicinal fruit of great importance. The first step in processing of pomegranate is to extract or separate the edible part that is the aril (juice enclosed seeds) from its peel and sheath. The traditional method for extraction of arils from pomegranate involves cutting the fruit in pieces and then separating arils by finger tips which tends to be very inefficient and labour intensive, time consuming and irritating. This paper describes the development and performance evaluation of a hand tool and a machine for easy and safe separation of arils from the whole pomegranate fruit. The tool is capable to break the pomegranate fruit in a manner of two irregular halves, separates arils about 35-40% during the breaking process and makes the remaining arils loosen which allows for easy separation further by finger tips. The tool is designed considering its appropriate functioning to accommodate medium size fruit which is distributed in maximum number on a particular plant. The machine named “CIPHET-Pomegranate Aril Extractor” relates to a mechanical and continuous system for processing of whole pomegranates of any size, shape and cultivar; and for recovery of clean, whole and undamaged arils. The machine is capable of processing the whole pomegranate at a rate of approximately 5.0 q per h with an extraction capacity of 92-94% and with little damage of arils that is about 2-3%. The tool and machine was tested for five popular cultivars (‘Ganesh’, ‘Mridula’, ‘White Muscut’, ‘G137’, ‘Sinduri’) of pomegranate and the performance was evaluated in terms of arils separation efficiency, damage percentage and the physico-chemical quality evaluation of the tool and machine separated arils in comparison to the arils separated by conventional method using knife and fingers. The performance of both the hand tool and the machine was found encouraging as it makes the task of safe separation of arils from the whole fruit effortless.