DEVELOPMENT OF PACKAGING MACHINE FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

Moisture loss of fresh fruits and vegetables is a main cause of deterioration. It resulted not only in the direct quantitative loss, but also in change in appearance, texture and nutrition. To reduce the loss of moisture content during the distribution in the market, fresh products are packaged using plastic films. But, most of the fresh products are packaged manually in Korea. In order to minimize the labor requirement, the packaging machine for fruits and vegetables was developed and tested. Prototype was composed of film feeding unit, bag former, products feeding conveyor, film feeding roller, center sealer, end sealer and discharge conveyor. Green peppers, carrots and perilla leaves were tested with prototype. Prototype could pack 1780, 1390, 1780 bags per hour at the feeding speed of 0.08m/s respectively and 2250, 1810, 2640bags per hour at the feeding speed of 0.10m/s respectively. And packaging speed of green peppers and carrots was improved by 3.7 and 3.4 times compared with manual packaging. The packaging condition with the prototype was good and the products had almost no damages.