Journal of Taiwan Agricultural Research

Author:Li-Duhng Huarng*, Tyng-Horng Chou and Chih-Kai Yang

Abstract:

    The bottleneck operation in the pickling process of mume fruit is to make a rift on the fruit. The main goal of the study is to develop a machine for mume fruit cracking before pickling with sugar for making crispy mume. The development of the machine will also lower the processing cost hence increasing the revenue of the crispy mume manufacturer as well as the growers. Experimental results showed that the elastic constant of a fruit during compression test could be as high as 12,340 kg/m. The maximum force needed to crack a mume was 50.9 kg and the average force of the 15 mume fruits was 39.6 kg with a standard deviation of 6.2 kg. The machine was designed to crack 5 fruits in a stroke; therefore, the mechanism must be designed to generate the required force. We have developed a prototype machine for mume cracking purpose. The first process in making pickled mume before cracking is to mix the fresh mume with the crude salt in a wood or metal container and then revolve for about 10 minutes. This process will remove the cilia on the skin surface of the mume fruit and also make the mume a little bit softer. The average capacity of the cracking machine in five runs is about 140 kg/hr which is about 10 times larger than that of a manual operation. The cracking quality was determined by the gap between the two parallel plates in which the mume was depressed. To gain better quality in cracking, it is suggested that the mume fruits should be sorted according to their size.

Key words:Mume, Crack, Elastic constant

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