BACKGROUND INFORMATION STUDY – CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS
A SHORT DESIGN BRIEF DESCRIPTION THAT DESCRIBES THE PROBLEM
Our design is intended to address the difficult and timely process of peeling a vast amount of
onions in a restaurant-type setting. Not only is this time consuming for restaurant workers, but it is also
unpleasant due to the smell and the chemical irritant that often causes tears. Our hope is that our design
will minimize the inconvenience of peeling large quantities of onions. We want our design to be small
enough to easily fit on a table or countertop and to easily be stored when not in use. Our design is to
accomplish the peeling process efficiently, successfully peeling 80% of the onion in 15s or less. The
80% requirement is in reference to the outside flaky skin of the onion as well as the first fleshy layer of
the onion. We chose a 15s cycle time to be sure that our process would be quicker than one worker
peeling the onion by hand. We want our design to be able to be operated by one user and easily cleaned.
Our design must also meet the standards described by NSF/ANSI 8 – 2012 Commercial Powered Food
Preparation Equipment.
SUMMARY OF RELEVANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Through research of the current markets in the onion peeling industry, we came across a couple
of industrial designs as well as some personal kitchen designs. The first model comes from Frain
Industries and is a two-piece onion peeler and dicer. An image of this machine can be seen in Figure 1.
6
Fig. 1 Frain Industries Machine1
Frain Industries has two machines, pictured above, that they use in combination to
peel and dice onions. The peeler requires the onion to already have the root ends cut off and
for an operator to place the onion into the machine at a specific orientation. The machine that
peels the onion is over 16 ft long and three feet wide. The peeler machine outputs a peeled
onion that is fed into a hopper that is connected to the dicer. The onion is diced into pieces
approximately 1/8”x1/8”x3/8”.
The second machine we came across is produced by M& P engineering and can be seen in
Figure
2. This machine by M&P Engineering cuts the root ends off onions and peels the outer
layers off the onion. One operator is required to position the onion appropriately into the
machine. Like our design, it does not dice the onion.
Fig. 2 M&P Engineering Onion Peeler2
For our design, we wanted to create a smaller-scale machine that fits more within
the restaurant industry. We want it to be able to peel more onions quicker than a single
person could or a person utilizing a number of the personal kitchen items that are capable
of peeling onions one by one.
ABSTRACT
n onion peeling machine was designed, manufactured, developed
and evaluated to suit the small and medium processing units. The
onion peeling machine consists of seven parts, main frame, peeling drum,
inlet and outlet openings, collection
basin, water and air supplying systems, and power transmission. The
machine was evaluated using different onion bulb sizes (small, medium
& large). A mixed sample of different sizes was also tested. The
evaluation process was conducted under three different drum rotational
speeds (30, 40 and 50 rpm), three different peeling residence times (1, 2
and 3mins) and three different batch loads (18, 24 and 30kg). The
optimum peeling efficiency of 74.9, 65.24, 80.08 and 85.45% were
obtained at 24kg batch load (0.36 ton/h.), 2min peeling residence time
and 40 rpm for small, medium, mixed and large sizes respectively. Water
pump and air compressor were added to the peeler to improve the peeling
efficiency, and it was tested under the previous conditions. The
corresponding values of peeling efficiency for the machine with pump
water at water pressure of 400kPa were 76.73, 83.06, 99.20 and 87.49 %,
respectively. While they were 76.33, 72.87, 87.530 and 88.37%,
respectively for air pumping at pressure of 500kPa. The estimated costs
of onions peeling machine were 28.47, 29.56 and33.75 L.E/ton for the
machine only, machine with water pump and machine with air
compressor respectively. These values of estimated costs using the
developed machine are very competitive with the cost of manual peeling
process which approached about 75 L.E/ton.
1. INTRODUCTION
Onions has been a popular food for many centuries. Today they are valued
for their flavor, aroma, and taste, being prepared domestically or forming
raw materials for a variety of food processes (dehydration, freezing,
canning and pickling).
They are probably the most universally used vegetable in most countries.
Onion peeling is an essential step in producing many of the onion
products such as dehydrated onions, onion powder, onion flavoring,
onion salt, onion rings, and pickled and canned onions. Several methods
have been used for peeling onions. The common methods used in modern
onion processing industry are lye treatment, flame peeling, and
mechanical peeling. Lye peeling and flame peeling methods are harsh
and are not suitable for many onion products (Wang, 1993, Srivastava
et al., 1997 and Naik et al., 2007).
Naik et al. (2007) designed and tested a batch type multiplier onion
peeling machine suitable for farm-level operation. Interaction studies
were carried out between the speed of rotation versus peeling efficiency.
Damage percentage, unpeeled samples and operational parameters were
optimized. The capacity of the peeler is 50-60kg/hr. The peeling
efficiency was about 92 % with unpeeled and damaged percentages of 6
and 2 %, respectively. The cost of peeling was worked out to be $27 per
tones.
Srivastava et al. (1997) designed and tested a medium-size onion
peeling machine. The novelty of the machine was four scoring blades
assisted by compressed air jets to slit the outer layers of the onion skin.
Tests were made to determine peeling performance as affected by onion
size, onion shape, compressed-air pressure, and onion feeding rate. The
performance of the machine was characterized by peeling efficiency,
peeling losses, and throughput rate. Feeding chain speed and air pressure
significantly affected the machine’s performance. The interactions of
onion size with air pressure and onion shape with chain speed
significantly affected all performance parameters.
Guldas (2003) found that hand peeling of kiwi fruit has some
disadvantages such as difficulty during peeling, increase of loss in weight
and nutritional value. Weight (fruit tissue) loss in hand peeling was
higher than alkali peeling.
Adnan (2010) designed and constructed an onion skin peeling machine
to meet the standards required by the customer or user. In general
machine construction methodology is based on the concept of friction on
the surface of the onion and topped with the use of water to helps soften
the surface of the onions before peeling process can be done. Meanwhile,
the methods and the use of machines is based on the rotation of a soft
brush attached to the shaft and fully controlled by a single phase AC
motor. This process is expected to make onion skin come out. This
machine is build to meet the demand from small-and medium industry in
design, function, and price. This machine is also expected to be used for
wedding fest preparation in the villages. Efficiency of this machine had
been measured and the data are being analyzed using Design Expert
software for the ANOVA procedure.
Considering the increasing demand for garlic products in domestic and
export market, a low cost garlic clove peeler was developed and its
performance was evaluated. The developed garlic clove peeler consisted
of a 130 mm diameter, 400 mm long peeling chamber mounted on a mild
steel (MS) angle frame. The top portion of the pressure chamber was
connected with a 40 mm diameter reducer to separate the thin husk from
the peeled material. A 10 mm galvanized iron (GI) pipe was inserted and
positioned at a height of 60 mm from the top surface of the garlic bed to
flow the air from the compressor. The peeling efficiency of 97.6 percent
was observed with peeling time of 70 s for a batch of 500 g (Mudgal
and Champawat, 2011).
Abrasive peeling was carried out for different types of vegetables with an
abrasive peeler. This is simply a drum with a rough inner surface and a
motor. After the vegetables are put inside the drum, the inlet is covered,
and the drum is allowed to rotate for a short time. This method is more
suitable for root vegetables than fruits, because the latter are usually
rather soft. Sweet potato is usually peeled by this method (Lin, 1995).
From the previous work, it is clear that the hand peeling process is very
tedious, time consuming work and costly as well, therefore, the main aim
of this study was to design, fabricate and evaluate an onion peeling
machine from local raw materials to assure high quality, high peeling
efficiency and losses reduction with low cost. This machine could be
used in small and medium production units, such as restaurants, hotels
and small onion dryers.
2. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES
2.1 Description of the onion peeling machine.
The onion peeling machine consists of seven parts, included main frame,
peeling drum, inlet and outlet openings, collection basin, water and air
supply systems, and power transmission, as shown in Fig. (1). The
peeling drum is considered the most important part in the machine; it has
a length of 1000 mm and diameter of 480 mm as shown in Fig.
(2).
18 17 15 6
16 14
13
4
19
7
3
20
8
400
12
300
21
530
11
1955
9
1400
1360 300
10
67
0
940 740
1080 820
1390
Elevation Side view
Dim.mm
1. Peeler chassis 8.Water pressure hose 15. An iron arm
2. Outlet opening 9.Two inlet openings 16. Water pump
3. Water by pass hose 10. Collection basin 17. V- belt adjust screw
4. Electric motor 11. Side cover 18. Gear box
5. Water tank pressure 12. A joint link 19. Sprocket and chain cover
6. metal couples 13. Water pressure control 20. Top cover
7. Water suction hose 14. Water pressure gage 21. Back cover
Fig. (1): Schematic diagram of the prototype onion peeling machine.
The peeling drum consists of two circular frames of galvanized metal
sheets with 4 mm thickness, 100 mm length and 480 mm diameter.
Twenty four peeling beams of galvanized sheet U-shaped with
dimensions of 25 x 35 x 2mm for height, width and thickness,
respectively, were fixed on the internal surface of the circular frame.
Each beam was filled with a wooden slice to fix the steel plate saw with a
sharp edge tooth on it using bolts to hold the plate saw inside the beam,
and to reduce the impact of onion falling during rotation. The depth of
abrasive edge can be adjusted by raising or lowering the plate saw by
external bolts. The upper distance from edge to edge of the saw teeth is 8
mm, and the number of saw teeth of 1 meter length is 125 teeth. A
250mm blank space was left between each beam to facilitate the delivery
of the peels. The drum was fixed on a horizontal shaft supported by one
ball bearing (30 mm ID) from the closed side of drum and mounted on
two wheels from the other opened sides.
10 00
35
480
1
3,5
25
2 8
1000
3
1
4
5
Detailes A
2
25
3
5
,
1000
3
1
5 4
Detailes A
1. Steel plate saw 3. peeling beam 5. Beam bolt
2. Wooden slice 4. Circular frame
Fig. (2): Schematic diagram of the peeling drum
The inlet and outlet openings were made of galvanized sheet metal of
1.5mm thickness; one for feeding and the other for unloading. The inlet
opening consists of two upper doors (400 x 300 mm dimensions), with an
empty vertical distance between them (140mm.) to be easy in raising or
lowering the nozzles pipe. During onion feeding, the outlet opening is
closed and these two doors are opened. The outlet opening is placed
under the inlet opening; the size of outlet opening is 400 x 300
mm.
The collection basin consists of four parts (the basin chassis, the water and peel collection basin,
the strainer stand and the strainer). The basin chassis which is mounted on four wheels to carry
the basin has 10mm thickness, and dimensions of 920 x820 x390mm for length, width and
height, respectively. The basin was made of galvanized steel sheet, of 1.5mm thickness and the
dimensions of basin are 900 x 800 x 460 mm for length, width and height, respectively. The
basin bottom is opened with a hole of 25 mm diameter attached with on/off valve to drain the
water.
