VNIT student patents machine to take drudgery out of all frying

Nagpur: In case you are often worried about overcooking snacks, getting burns or stains while deep frying your food, here is a cool solution from VNIT’s mechanical engineering students. Keeping in mind the drudgery and hazards of frying food items, the researchers have designed and developed a multipurpose frying machine to deep fry any kind of snack, like poori, samosa, alubonda, sabudana wada etc, beside performing other tasks.
The machine can also turn over all the items being fried in one go to maintain uniformity in cooking as well as texture. It can remove all the fried items from the frying section at one go. It has an arrangement to filter oil to get rid of debris. This maintains the quality of oil and fried products remain clean.
The heating is hybrid in nature. Oil can be heated using electric coils or conventional burners of LPG cylinder. Side turning of items during frying is manual and the oil pumping is automatic. This machine can be upgraded to make it fully automatic as per the requirements. This product recently received a patent and is now available for order, said a press release by VNIT.
Rashmi Uddanwadiker, associate professor at VNIT Nagpur, had submitted a proposal to Khadi and Industrial Village Commission (KVIC) to design and develop semi-automatic frying machine. Jitesh Deshmukh worked under Uddanwadiker as part of his MTech project.
The work began with the identification of issues at a traditional frying station. Handling hot frying skimmers, handling oil with various pots, oil filtration, maintaining oil temperature for some fried items, and continuously turning over fried items with the help of frying skimmers or spoons one by one are some of the issues. All of these issues eventually lead to exhaustion of the cook when they have to operate non-stop.
VC Bhujade, technical assistant, mechanical engineering department, assisted in the fabrication of the machine and was actively involved in testing the machine.
Experiments showed that this new frying machine will be a milestone in Indian frying methods because of its advanced technique, said the press release.
How it works
* Machine’s rectangular section is primary component where products are fried
* Section is mounted on main stand with lever to take out and turn friend items
* Turning mechanism consists of chain sprocket arrangement
* Blades and mechanisms are mounted on the frame operated with a lever
* Perforated tray acts as skimmer and aids in easy removal of products using lever
* Flow control valve mounted on frying section
* Upper oil section and water section mounted at bottom, with funnel attached to right side of oil section
* Pumping section mounted on left, oil section connected to frying section by pipe