Design and development of smart cashew nut shelling

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

The present approach aims at the development of cashew nut shelling machine suited for cashew nuts
assimilating a new shell mechanism. The major risk involved being spilling of fluid from the shell that causes
partial/permanent blindness to workers and a harmful effect on the skin. The machinery involved with processing is bulky, costly, imported as well as need regular maintenance. This approach intends to build a smart machine that can fulfil requirements of the farmer as well as provide additional functions such as inspection, packaging and online maintenance (through the internet). The machine allows the users to monitor and sorts out any issues or faults if occurs during shelling process. Since the orientation of the machine was to be in a vertical direction, it influences gravity. Thus inverse slider crank mechanism is used to actuate the oscillator unit that drives the scrapper. Once oscillator and feeder units are powered up as the feeder loads nuts one by one, oscillator brings it down and fixes at a position and scrapper forces the cashew nut to pass between blades for performing shelling. An optional attempt to grade cashew nut using image processing through template matching was proposed for w180 and w210 grades. Apparently, some cashew nut which is counted by proximity sensor sends the signal of counts to Arduino UNO
board; this information is then sent through the transmitter to the website. A smart phone which uses HTTP and Android application protocol are used to display data of weight so far shelled and thus, can be used for bidding in
the market directly to the government or consumers. This adds up transparency and money flow towards the producers. The machine was tested, and the shelling efficiency was found to be 70% greater than the conventional method of cracking nuts.