Author(s):

Vivek Kumar and Anand Rao Azad

Abstract: Fresh fruits and vegetables are important component of human diet because they are rich source of various types of nutrient. Washing is the first essential primary unit operation for value addition of vegetable at farm level as well as for processing. This unit operation becomes very cumbersome when we take it with different root crops such as Carrot, Ginger, Turmeric, Shatavari and Taro because of their different shape and size. Soil and other foreign materials must be removed, especially for medium and heavy textured soil in which a pre-harvest irrigation is used to loosen the soil. The washing of these roots crops are done manually by farmers and agricultural labour which consumes lot of time and money. The objective of this project was to evaluate the performance of continuous type carrot washer in terms of mechanical, microbial washing efficiency and bruising percentage. The machine was operated at 25 rpm with feed rate of 400 kg/h and power was given with 0.5 horse power motor. Then the result were analyzed and maximum mechanical washing efficiency was found in case of the carrot which was 80.46% followed by Ginger (78.79%), Taro (76.70%) and Shatavari (74.18%) and least in turmeric (63.73%).The microbial washing efficiency was found maximum in case of carrot (79.64%) followed by Turmeric (76.16%), Ginger (70.58%), Taro (66.94%) and least in case of Shatavari (59.70%). The bruising efficiency was found minimum in case of Taro (3.60%) and maximum in case of carrot (8.41%). The minimum retention time was in Taro (1.20 min) and maximum in Ginger (2.11min).

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