Garlic Peeler

Project By Stephanie

Problem Statement

Every summer, NEHIR, an NGO in the Himalayas of India, harvests its garlic for production. The garlic is dried, peeled, and turned into various products such as dried garlic and garlic powder. To dry the garlic after peeling and produce ready products, intact garlic cloves are placed in a dehydrator for several hours. Once out of the dehydrator, they are packaged and sold.

Every year following the garlic harvest at NEHIR, the organization relies entirely on workers to manually hand-peel every clove of garlic for production. This hand peeling takes a long time and causes severe muscle aches due to the repetitive motion. Past attempts to buy automated infrastructure for this issue resulted in product loss because the machine was tearing up the garlic. It also uses energy and produces emissions, which contribute to climate change and render the garlic peels useless for fertilizer. NEHIR needs a non-destructive, efficient, and simple solution to peel garlic to boost production.

Research and Discovery

During my initial research, I discovered there were mainly two types of garlic peelers: machine and conventional peelers. Machine peelers are most often used in factory settings and utilize various electronic parts such as hoppers, motors and fans. Conventional peelers, on the other hand, use force from a human, whether directly or indirectly, to peel garlic.

Ideation and Iteration

After completing research I created design specifications and moved into brainstorming. Based on the design specifications, I came up with four main design ideas :

Pedals attached to a bike wheel with jars on the spokes which would shake the garlic
The same design as 1, but with wheels attached through a chain
A tumbler design which used the pedals to turn it
A drum pedal-like design

I used a weighted evaluation matrix with the design specifications, and the top design was the separated pedals, with the tumbler coming in a close second. With that, I started modelling the design in SolidWorks; however, it quickly became clear the design wouldn't be feasible in the time we had for the project. With advice from Dr. Li, I pivoted to the tumbler idea but used a salad spinner-like device, which already had the needed spinning mechanism, to save time. All that was left was to design the inside of the tumbler so it could actually peel the garlic. Once again, I created multiple designs, but only one could be printed: the design in the photo below.

Final Design and Testing

The final peeler design can be seen on the right. I used a hand-powered mincer, which I bought at a local appliance store. The device was string-powered and rotated the tumbler when pulled. Depending on how hard I pulled, the tumbler spun at different RPMs. To test the optimal time to peel garlic without damaging it, I ran two tests. In the first test, I spun the garlic for different lengths of time and counted the number of cloves that were not peeled, slightly peeled, fully peeled, or damaged. The second test measured the time it took to fully peel garlic using both the tumbler and hand peeling. I wanted to identify how much time the tumbler reduced hand peeling. I first spun the garlic in the tumbler for the time on the x-axis, then started the clock and hand-peeled the loose peels until all the garlic was fully peeled. The results showed that about three minutes (180s) is the optimal spinning time.

Future Plans

After testing, five main improvements were identified :

The device needs to be scaled up to peel more garlic and be effective
The device needs to be built out of a crank machine rather than a string-pulled machine due to the string getting tangled in testing
Deeper ridges are needed to provide more force
A base is needed to stabilize the device when using it
Various materials for the tumbler, which have different friction coefficients, should be tested

I plan to continue this project when I return to Queen's in the fall and keep in contact with NEHIR and the locals in Almora.

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