DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF A VARIABLE CHIP SIZE PLANTAIN SLICING MACHINE

ABSTRACT

    This project describes the design and Fabrication of a variable chip size plantain slicing machine. The traditional and conventional plantain chips slicing with the use of hand and knife causes injury, time consuming, unhygienic and less product output, hence the design and fabrication of a variable size chip plantain slicing machine that has an advantage of flexible adjustability of slicing  different  plantain slices.

      The motorized circular blade plantain slicer consist of a small cylindrical hopper that allows the vertical or inclined insertion of a plantain fruit drops by gravity and blade is driven by an electric motor. The blade is fixed in such a way that it can slice the plantain fruit at different pre-set distance along the length of the fruit as it drops from the hopper to the receiving plate. The design and fabrication of this machine was done using locally available material and technology. The slicing machine thus produced from this research has the following parameters 0.34kw of the electric power, the motor speed was 1400rpm.  The shaft deflection was 0.0112, which has no significant effect on the cutting dimensional accuracy of the machine.

      It takes the fabricated plantain slicing machine an average time of 5seconds to slice. A factor of safety of 1.5 was considered. The plantain slicing machine was successfully designed, fabricated and tested for its performance efficiency. A maximum efficiency of 80.95% was achieved with the operation during testing after the machine has being fabricated. The output throughout of the machine was calculated to be 156kg/h. this was an improvement on some reviewed plantain slicing machine. It was recommended that the plantain slicing machine should be improved upon as there were limitations in the proper and quality production of components. Though there was an adjustment for the slicing blade to enable varying sizes of plantain to be cut, there is need for improvement of blade design to cater for the effect of ripeness level of plantains.