Abstract
DESIGN, FABRICATION AND TESTING OF A DUAL POWERED PLANTAIN SLICER
Oyedele, O. A.*, Adeyanju O. O., and Owolabi, H. B.
ABSTRACT
This work focused on the design and fabrication of a dual powered slicer for raw plantain and potato chips production. Plantain is cultivated in many tropical and temperate regions. The traditional method of knife slicing plantain has proven to be laborious, time consuming and unhygienic with low output. The design and fabrication of plantain slicing machine is to solve the aforementioned problems. The design parameters determined are the diameter of the shaft (D), the power requirement (P), belt and pulley size. The machine is electrically and manually powered with a 0.7443 kW electric motor while the calculated shaft diameter is 25 mm diameter. The slicer was designed for medium and small scale industries but can also be used for domestic purpose. The slicer works on the principle of cutting to reduce plantain and potato size. The slicer used between 5-8 second to slice a finger of an average- size plantain into chips at 0.78 mm thickness. The slicer achieves 93.93%, 90.26%, and 62.90% efficiency, for slicing unripe, semi-ripe and ripe matured plantain pulps respectively. The capacity for unripe, semi-ripe and ripe was calculated to be 64.3 kg/hr, 61.5 kg/hr and 60.3 kg/hr, respectively. The percentage moisture content for unripe, moderate ripe and ripe plantain was calculated to be 48%, 50% and 56% on wet basis, respectively.
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