The Development of a Continuous Chili Pepper Destemming Mechanism

Abstract

One wholesale greenmarket has a large amount of chili peppers entering the market every day. All chili peppers are for sale either with or without stem. Destemmed chili peppers must be in good conditions namely no major damage of the pod and complete removal of calyx. In general, the market produces destemmed chili peppers manually by workers. This, however, comes with limitations of low throughput and worker shortage. To overcome these limitations an efficient, high speed destemming machine is required. Unfortunately, such machine does not exist to date. This research invented a new destemming principle, designed and constructed a chili pepper destemming mechanism that operated efficiently and continuously. The mechanism employed symmetric, double slider-crank mechanisms and linear cam for pressing and pulling the stem through a countersink hole, thus firmly held the stem onto the hole. A pusher was used to create moment perpendicular to the pod’s axis that separated the pod from its stem. Further development was made to enable a continuous operation of the process. The countersink hole was replaced by two plates with chamfered edges spaced in parallel. A V-shaped bended plate attached on a conveyor chain was used to carry a chili pepper to the destemming mechanism by leading the stem into the space between two chamfered edges. Performance test with properly selected chili peppers at processing speed of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 pepper per second showed that the mechanism was able to separate stem from pod for all peppers. Of all 5 speeds, the processed pod showed 94, 94, 96, 66 and 30 percent respectively of good quality results. There were respectively 6, 6, 4, 6 and 6 percent of acceptable quality results, which means a minor damage on pod or a little left behind of calyx. There were 28 and 64 percent major damage respectively in 4 and 5 pepper per second speed cases.