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Palmyrah (Borassus flabellifer L) fruit pulp is available abundantly and has a high potential for food in rural areas, useful for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications, however, the main hindrance for this pulp is lack of mechanization and availability of pulp in sufficient quantity at one place. The pulp of this fruit is usually used by rural communities where the processors use manual pulping, which is not only time-consuming but yields seasonally during July and August in India. Therefore, the objective of this work was to design, develop and evaluate the efficiency of fruit pulp extractors. The pulper was designed and developed such way that to be compact and easy to operate, consisting of the main housing with stainless steel teeth on a rotating shaft and pulping performed by beating and shearing. The performance evaluation of the machine was carried out at different rpm (320, 360, 410) input capacity (8, 10 and 12 kg) for fixed time of operation is 6 minutes. The pulp weight was evaluated during the pulping process period. The highest pulping efficiency (84.78%) and pulp recovery (33.9%) was obtained rpm of 410, with 6 minutes of pulping, and batch capacity of 10 kg of fruits which resulted in a capacity of 50 kg fruits per hour. This high efficiency makes this mechanized effective for pulping palmyrah fruits and, thus, it can replace manual pulping, especially in rural communities involved with the palmyrah fruit pulping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study was conducted to investigate large scale drying of ripe chillies in unutilized tobacco barns. Experiments indicated that ten quintals of ripe chillies can be loaded in a 6 mx3.6 m size barn. Galvanized iron wire mesh trays of size 105 cmx75 cmx7.5 cm were found to be suitable to spread chillies on the existing tiers. Drying time required to reduce moisture from 292.5% to 9.6% (db) varied considerably depending upon whether chilli pods were thin pericarp type varieties or thick pericarp type hybrids. The hybrids took about 40 hours to dry whereas the varieties took about 24 hours. Drying air temperatures ranging initially at 50? to a final value of about 55°C were found to be appropriate to dry chillies. Open yard sun drying took 12 and 17 days for varieties and hybrids respectively. The discoloured pods were low, 3.5%- 4% in barn dried process in comparison to 12% to 14% in open yard sun drying. The study suggests that unutilized barns can be converted to dry ripe chillies on a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]