Design, construction and performance evaluation of a portable sweet potato slicer

Abstract

This study focused on the design, construction and performance evaluation of a portable motorized sweet potato slicer. The components of the slicer include a feeding trough, frame, slicing disc, collection tray and power transmission unit. The machine was powered by a 1 hp electric motor. A 3 x 2 factorial experiment in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) was used to investigate the effects of operational speeds (312, 406 and 501 rpm) and tuber diameters (25-50 and 51-70 mm) on the performance of the machine in terms of slicing efficiency and machine capacity. The performance evaluation of the slicer was carried out in triplicates and ANOVA was used in evaluating the results. The results from the study showed that variations in operational speed had significant effect (p≤0.05) on slicing efficiency and machine capacity while effect of tuber size was only significant (p ≤ 0.05) on capacity and not significant on the slicing efficiency. The slicing efficiency of the slicer increased from 74.4% to 94.1% and 76.0% to 96.4% for 25-50 mm and 51-70 mm tuber diameters respectively as the operational speed decreased from 501 to 312 rpm. The optimum rotational speed of the slicer obtained was 312 rpm at an average efficiency of 94.5% and capacity of 128.46 kg/h. The thickness of the slices produced from the slicer ranged from 2-4 mm. The machine helped to reduce drudgery associated with manual slicing of sweet potato.