DEVELOPMENT OF A MOBILE MACHINE FOR PICKING PRICKLY PEAR FRUIT

Hand harvesting of prickly pear fruits is greatly inefficient; it is slow and expensive, field conditions are arduous, unsafe and risky. Prickly pear plant is entirely covered with thorns, while fruit has easily detachable microscopic hairs that stuck in bare skin; scaring off untrained workers. A mobile mechanical machine for picking prickly pear fruits was designed, fabricated and evaluated for its performance and techno-economic feasibility. Some physical and mechanical properties (dimensions, mass, volume, density, static coefficient of friction and shear force) of prickly pear fruits that are pertinent to the mechanical processing were measured and considered by the design of the machine. The developed machine was evaluated at two power source (mechanical and manual) and mechanical source provides two levels of crank speed (40 and 60 rpm). The evaluation was based on the following parameters: productivity, fruit damage, consumed energy and picking cost comparing with hand picking.The obtained results of the developed machine gave positive results for evaluation criteria. The productivity increased by 171.4 %, minimizes the fruit damage by 42.4 %, decreased consumed energy by 13.28 times and decreased picking cost by 29.8 % comparing with hand picking method.