Study and Analysis of Areca-Nut Peeling Process Using Design of Experiment

Abstract - Areca nut is one of the most important commercial crops. The raw fruit has to be pealed in order to get its nut (kernel). Manual pealing process which is labor intensive and not safety to the labor. The automatic machines developed are not efficient to completely remove the husk from the nut due to variation in the size of the areca nut and the non availability of the optimum process parameters. The wood cutting process is related to the areca nut peeling because the areca nut husk will have wood like constituency. The parameters affecting the wood cutting will have significant effect on the areca nut husk removal, like speed of the cutter, depth of cut, hook angle of cutter and the condition of areca nut. In this research a prototype areca nut machine is developed suit to peel three different sizes of the dried areca nut and experiments are conducted for determining the optimum peeling process parameters using Taguchi approach.