Design and Fabrication of Variable Chip Size Plantain Slicing Machine

Abstract

This paper describes the design and fabrication of a variable chip-size plantain slicing machine. Traditional and conventional plantain chip slicing with the use of hands and knives causes injury, is time-consuming, is unhygienic, and results in less product output; hence the design and fabrication of a variable-size chip plantain slicing machine that has the advantage of flexible adjustability for slicing different plantain slices. The design and fabrication of this machine were done using locally available materials and technology. The slicing machine thus produced from this research has the following parameters: 0.34 kW of electric power, and the motor speed was 1400 rpm. 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 of 5 seconds to slice. A factor of safety of 1.5 was considered. The plantain slicing machine was successfully designed, fabricated, and tested for its efficiency. A maximum efficiency of 80.95% was achieved with the operation during testing after the machine had been fabricated. This shows that the machine was effective.