| dc.description.abstract | Coconuts are a very popular fruit worldwide. They have a variety of uses, as well as health and
nutritional benefits. The uses of coconuts range from cooking and nutrition to skin health, cancer
prevention, beauty products, and fuel. Scraping coconut is a laborious and time-consuming
process. The manual process requires the operator to both rotate and apply pressure to scrape out
the flesh of the coconut. The commercialized coconut scraping machines that are available are not
fully automated and still involve manual effort. The semi-automated process requires the operator
to hold the coconut half-shell against a rotary blade usually powered by an electric motor. In both
methods, the operator is presented with different risks of injury. This paper describes how an
automated coconut scraping machine has been developed to solve the well-known challenges
regarding grating coconuts. The design proposed in this study eliminates virtually all hazards
related to coconut scrapers. It is a fully-automated machine that reduces both risk and effort on the
part of the operator. The system incorporates an adjustable blade that allows movement along two
axes. A clamping mechanism that moves in the third direction allows a three-dimensional
movement. The mounting of the coconut half shell in the clamp takes no more than fifteen seconds.
Upon mounting, at the push of a start button, the scraping of the coconut is completely automatic.
Details of the design and development of the working model constitute the main contribution of
this paper | en_US |
