Genesis

Nagarajan owns a small scale lathe workshop named Virgo Industry. The factory has been manufacturing accessory parts like aspirator, destoner, heat reducer and grinder used in the rice hulling units for the past 17 years. It operates from a very small and old rented house. Virgo Industry was founded by Nagarajan’s late father who used to provide support services to the nearby rice mills. But over the last few years, continuous drought affected not only the farmers but also all the dependent industries. Most of the rice mills in the nearby areas have closed down. These circumstances forced the entrepreneur to seek some other avenues for survival. Nagarajan’s close interaction with the pickle manufacturers exposed him to the problems prevailing in the industry. Some of the local pickle manufacturing companies requested him to design and develop a system to peel off garlic for making garlic pickles. Nagarajan successfully designed and developed a garlic-peeling machine in 2002 after two years of hard work. Later, he developed a lemon cutting machine as well.

Garlic peeling machine

The garlic peeling machine consists of a 2 HP electric motor, blowers, a peeling chamber, inlet, outlet, exhaust pipe and drives. The peeling chamber has a provision for garlic inlet and a shaft on which the blades are arranged in such a manner that there are six rows and each row consists of four blades placed at an equiangular distance of 90 degrees. The blades are arranged in two consecutive rows. In one row, the blades intersect vertically and horizontally, and in the other row, the blades intersect diagonally. The peeling chamber is cylindrical and the internal walls are serrated. The drives consist of three shafts and pulleys and are transmitted with the use of V-belts. The machine consists of two blowers of different sizes. A housing, made of a steel sheet, covers the entire mechanism. The manufacturing cost of a single prototype is Rs.52,000 inclusive of labour charge and other running costs.

How the machine works

The garlic is fed into the peeling chamber through the inlet chute. Power is transmitted from the two HP motor shafts through V-belts. The pulley, fitted on the shaft, rotates the small blower. Pressurized air from the small blower removes the excess moisture from the garlic on the way to the peeling chamber. The cloves entering the peeling chamber are pushed by the pressurized air from the big blower to the rotating blade. The rotating blades hit the garlic cloves towards the serrated wall of the peeling chamber and there these get peeled. At the same time, the pressurized air from the big blower pushes out the dust and the skin of the garlic cloves through the exhaust pipe. The peeled garlic cloves from the peeling chamber are collected through the outlet by gravity.

Advantages

The machine has the capacity to peel 200 kg of garlic cloves/hr. The garlic cloves thus obtained are of uniform size and can be neatly and conveniently collected and recovered. Another feature of this machine is that it is easy to construct, operate, and maintain. The machine helps to achieve greater productivity, is energy efficient and labour saving and reduces the drudgery in the slow laborious manual process of peeling garlic. It can also be used in other food processing industries apart from the pickle industry.