Development and performance evaluation of pea depoding machine

India is the world's second largest producer of food next to China, and has a great potential in the food and agriculture sector. Although agricultural mechanization has improved productivity to great extent, still postharvest value addition to the raw product in India is only 7 per cent, which may be mainly due to lack of processing technologies. There is need to develop more processing machinery for the value addition of agricultural produce with reduction in time and labour. Pea is an important cool season, leguminous crop of India. Peas are consumed after removing green kernels from the pods. Due to urbanisation demand of shelled and frozen peas has been increased tremendously. Manual removal of pea kernels from pods is a laborious and time consuming job with one person depod about 3–3.5 kg of pea kernels from pods in one hour. In view of non-availability of efficient pea depoding machine work on design and fabrication of pea depoding machine was undertaken by Punjab Agricultural University. This machine is based on the principle of friction generated by the rubbing of pea pods between the blades and the sieve of the machine which helps in opening the pea pods. The machine was fabricated by using the low cost material. Performance evaluation of machine was done to optimize various machine parameters such as peripheral speed of blades shaft, blade size and clearance between sieve and blades. Based upon performance analysis the depoding efficiency of pea was 95.4 per cent and whole grain efficiency of peas was 91.3 per cent with grain damage of 2 per cent was obtained at 0.158 m/s peripheral speed of blades shaft and 10 mm clearance between blades and sieve by using blades of 2.5” size aligned at angle of 180° with respect to each other. This machine is capable of extracting 30 kg/h of shelled peas. This technology will save depoding time and will provide maximum benefits to the farmers and small industries.