Abhi Jain, Aviral Yadav, Khyati Singh,Deepak Kumar
INTRODUCTION
Sitaphal is a fruit which is mainly found in forest areas. It is found mainly in the regions of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Sitaphal is one of the major forest produce in tribal regions of Devla district near Udaipur, Rajasthan. It has nutritional value and it also good in taste. Its seeds has medicinal values and are highly demanded in the market. It is a seasonal fruit and is an extra source of income for tribal people.Sitaphal is mainly collected by women and children in the family and the pulp is extracted which provides them some extra value of the fruit. Few years before, when there was no Pulp Extraction Processing Centre, they used to sell Sitaphal on roadside which gives them very low value of the fruit. This initiative was taken by the DFO of Udaipur, Mr. O.P. Sharma to provide employment and extra earnings for tribal people. Pulp was more value than Sitaphal and is used for flavoring ice-creams and as mentioned the pulp has value of Rs.250/kg which Sitaphal sold there are Rs.20-25/kg. The problem regarding Sitaphal was to store the pulp. Sitaphal degrades, becomes bitter in taste and color changes if it comes in contact to air and if it is kept at required temperature (~10oC). Since there was no electricity available at every village, so the main problem came to design a low cost, non-electric rural chiller. The problem was to store the Sitaphal pulp for at-least 24hrs such that it does not degrade. Keeping the above constraints in mind we have developed a prototype for cooling and work using Solar Energy. The final prototype is a small 1/30 scale of the required refrigerator. The proposed solution’s concept is to use a refrigerator at centralized location to freeze PCM/ Glycol. Then the collector will transfer it to small processing centre during collection time. The model works using thermoelectric material while for actual product either thermoelectric or compressor refrigerator can be used depending on system size.