Development of an NCAM Tuber-Shaped Vegetable Slicing Machine

Abstract

Generally, most agricultural products are not stable immediately when freshly harvested, while their preservative nature varies accordingly especially, vegetables and fruit crops. The need to process and preserve them in a stable form is very important. In processing of some tuber -shaped vegetable crops such as carrot, plantain, cucumber, eggplant, etc., slicing/chipping is usually done traditionally with the aid of knives and other manual methods which are time consuming, thereby exposing processors to dangers of injury, increases drudgery and overall reduces productivity. In respect of these, an NCAM tuber - shaped vegetable slicer was designed, fabricated and evaluated. The performance parameters used for the evaluation are slicing efficiency, slice thickness and percentage damage. IBM SPSS 2.0 was used to analyse the result obtained from the performance evaluation of the tuber – shaped slicer. It was observed that blade thickness had a significant effect on percentage damage and slice thickness, and no effect on slicing efficiency at p≤0.05. 94.74% and 90.99% efficiency was observed at 1.5 mm and 1 mm blade thickness for plantain and cucumber respectively. Furthermore, the highest mean value for percentage damage for plantain was 44.08% at 1.0mm blade thickness, while the highest mean value of percentage damage for cucumber was 24.88% at blade thickness of 1.0mm. This shows that the tuber – shaped vegetable slicing machine performed efficiently.  Therefore, tuber-shaped slicing machine is recommended for use by processor of tuber – shaped crops into other stable form.