Semi Automated Palm Jaggery making Unit

India is the largest consumer and second largest producer of sugar in the world. Sugar industry is the second largest organized sector industry in the country. Traditionally the nectar is collected, boiled and given different shapes by pouring the mixture in the hollow bamboo moulds or granulated. The palm water/sugarcane juice is purified by filteration and boiled in larger vats to specific viscousity. The liquid is poured in suitable moulds and cooled to the soild form in a few minutes. It has gained a lot of popularity in the global health community as an alternate to the already existing sweeteners in the market, since it has high nutrition and low GI and suitable for diabetics. The price of the palm jaggery is double that of sugar.

The main objective is to reduce human drudgery, to reduce time consumption, to have hygienic processing, to reduce pollution. We the students of agriculture engineering fabricated a semi-automated jaggery maker for small scale production which mainly consists of a frame, boiling tank, agitator, scraper, mold and AC Motor of 0.5 hp. Here we used filtered sugarcane juice of 20 L and heated the boiling tank with the help of LPG stove and hence the feed gets concentrated. Since the scraping is facilitated with the help of an anchor agitator and scraper attached to it at the bottom. A hand operated lever is provided by the side to tilt the boiling tank to transfer the concentrated product into the mold. The jaggery cakes can be obtained from the mold once after they are allowed for cooling.

Time consumed	2 hours 10 minutes
Juice used(Sugarcane Juice)	20 litres
Jaggery obtained	4.5 kg
Total cost of unit	50,000 INR
Efficiency = Revenue / Expenditure	0.71%

Project done by the Agriculture Engineering department students: Y.Balaji, T.Dhinesh Kumar, P.Isai Maharajan, K.Kanmani.