Development and evaluation of jackfruit bulb slicer

Abstract

Traditional methods of jackfruit chips making involves four major units operations namely peeling of fruits, cutting of fruits into slices, frying and packaging. Each of these unit operations are done manually especially due to the lack of appropriate mechanical system. At present the chips are made by cutting and slicing raw jackfruit by knife and then deep frying in edible oil. The method is unhygienic and does not produce chips of uniform thickness and may cause injury to the person while slicing. But still the manual method of slicing is widely used due to the lack of efficient mechanical slicers. Hence there is a need to develop a new model of jackfruit slicer which can compete with manual slicing both in speed and quality. The new slicer can be efficiently used in both small and large scale industries for slicing jackfruits with minimum loss of material (10.0 %) and quality. It is a user-friendly machine capable of slicing jackfruit at uniform thickness. Continuous feeding is possible through stainless steel feeding tray which hold the peeled jackfruit bulb, which is then fed in between the blade drum and the conveying drum. The new slicer could be efficiently used in both small and large scale industries for slicing jackfruits with enhanced capacity of 50 kg/hr. T The fabrication cost of the machine was about Rs 30,000/- and the total operating cost of the machine for 1 hour was calculated using fixed cost and variable cost method as Rs 65.981/ hr. This can also be used as a multipurpose slicer.