Mass modelling of red sitaphal variety of custard Apple

Red Sitaphal is the name of variety of custard apple grown in Maharashtra. Earlier custard apple was grown in forest only but now it is growing in organized orchard. The postharvest system for these fruits is not yet adequately developed, and therefore several handling problems are still common. For proper design of grading systems, important relationships among the mass and other properties of fruits such as length, width, thickness, volumes, bulk density, true density, pulp, peel, seed content must be known. The aim of this research was to measure and present some physical properties custard apple fruit. The gross weight, size, arithmetic mean diameter, sphericity, surface area, seeded pulp content, deseeded pulp content, peel content, number of seeds per fruit and volume of custard apple fruit varied in the range of 68.4 to 214.1g, 5.4 to 7.2 cm, 5.5 to 7.3 cm 0.8 to 1.0, 92.2 to 165.6 cm² 24.3 to 56.1%, 19.3 to 48.6%, 31.0 to 65.5%, 11 to 25 and 99.2 to 225.9 cm³, respectively. Mass of custard apple fruit of Red sitaphal variety can be estimated from length and width of fruit using model M=K1L+K2W+C. This model had highest coefficient of determination R2 and lowest RMSE value among all the models.