Design and development of a

mechatronic intelligent pistachio

splitter
Authors: M. Shamsi , M. Mohamadi , M. Loghavi

Prepared by:
Shacheendra Kishor Labh
16MTMECT001
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ABSTRACT
This paper describes the design and development of an intelligent
pistachio splitter. The jaws of this machine apply force to the closed
shell pistachio until it opens. The moment that the closed shell
pistachio opens is sensed and right after, the forcing is stopped which
prevents the nut from braking into pieces.
In order to evaluate the performance of the machine, the varieties of
35 closed shell pistachios were tested. The results show that the
machine splits 92.2% of the shells exactly from the suture line where
it opens naturally on the tree.

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INTRODUCTION
From marketing point of view the price of naturally split pistachios is
twice as high as the price of closed shells.
The closed shell pistachios are manually split which is a very slow,
difficult, unhygienic and worker intensive operation.
Many attempts have been conducted to invent suitable pistachio
splitting machines.
The main weakness of previous mechanical splitters is that they are
not intelligent and do not sense the splitting moment so they smash
or fail to split some shells.
In this research a mechatronic intelligent machine has been
developed and tested for splitting closed shell pistachios.
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The Splitter Prototype
1. 20W permanent magnet electric motor.
2. 36 teeth sprocket
3. Screw
4. Bearing
5. Moving jaw
6. Sliding Guide
7. Ball bearing
8. Fixed Jaw
9. Pistachio nut
10. Electronic Circuit

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Design of Mechanical Part
A systematic design method was used to design the mechanical part
of the machine. The important feature of the machine was defined
as: the ability to stop forcing the pistachio nut right after splitting the
shell. This feature prevents the nut from smashing.

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 The alternative concepts for each function were generated by
morphological chart and were evaluated by weighted objectives
method.
Example of a morphological chart

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Force Sensor
During the splitting process the motor current is increasing until the
instant that the shell splits. When the shell splits the force in the jaws
decreases and proportionally the motor current falls down.
The moment that the force and proportionally the motor current start
to drop is the splitting moment. Simply the motor current was used as
a signal to sense the force and the splitting moment.
The positive point with the current measurements is the big changes
in the current value which makes it possible to measure the changes
precisely.

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The Electronic Part
The force applied to the pistachio shell is proportional to the motors
current. This current is converted to an electrical voltage. The voltage
then passes through an analog to digital board which changes the
voltage to the binary codes.
For decision making, the codes are given to a microprocessor.
The control system consists of a microprocessor circuit, a computer
program and a microcontroller program. This system controls the
moving jaw of the mechanical actuator which is driven by a two-
speed DC permanent magnet motor.

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The CPU and PC program
The CPU program controls all of the system.
The start command is applied to the A/D converter to start the
conversion of the analog input to the digital output. Each 10 ms a
sample of the motor current is taken and is reported to the computer.
A part of the CPU program is the decision making algorithm.
To prevent the damage of the jaw, a maximum value was defined for
the force. If the force is more than the maximum value (MAX), the
motors rotation direction reverses, the jaw moves back (opens) and
stops at its starting position.

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RESULTS
To evaluate the machines performance samples of 35 varieties of
pistachios were collected from the Iranian Pistachio Research Center in
Rafsanjani city. A maximum of 10 random closed shell nuts were selected
from each sample. All pistachios were split by the machine. Based on the
quality of splitting by the machine the split pistachios were divided into 4
groups: good split, smashed, split from bottom and split from side.
The analysis of the data shows that the machine splits 92.2% of the
pistachios from the line of suture of the pistachio shell, where the shell
naturally opens on the tree.
The machine smashes 1.37% of the pistachios. It splits 3.41% of the
samples from the bottom and 3.07% of them are split from the side.
The observations showed that most of the smashed pistachios are blank or
without kernel.
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 The experiments results showed that the machine is able to apply force to the nut until it splits.
Then it senses the splitting moment, stops the force and returns the moving jaw to its starting
position. The sample curve of the motor current against the time for a splitting period is shown in
The current curve increases and starts to decrease when the nut splits.

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 Time measurements showed that the required time to split 290
pistachios is 2730 s. It gives an average time of 9.3 s for splitting each
pistachio.
In the other hand it is 387 pistachios per hour or 0.387 kg/hr.
To increase the machine capacity it is possible to increase the jaw
speed. This time can be reduced to 2 s which was measured to be the
practical time that an operator can feed pistachios one by one to the
machine (if the feeding is automatic using higher speeds is also
possible).
This increases the machine capacity to 1.8 kg/hr.
It is also possible to use parallel units. If 100 units work together the
machine capacity increases to 180 kg/hr or about 1.44 tons per day
which is an acceptable capacity compare to some other pistachio
processing machines.

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CONCLUSION
An intelligent mechatronic pistachio splitter was developed and
tested.
The machine could split different varieties of closed shell pistachios
with an efficiency of 92.2%.
There is no need to sort pistachios before splitting.
The machine capacity is about 387 pistachio nuts or 0.387 kg/hr.
To increase the machine capacity the jaws speed can be increased or
parallel units can be used.

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THANK YOU!

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