DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A MOTORISED PLANTAIN CHIPPING MACHINE USING RESPONSE SURFACE METHODOLOGY

A lot of drudgeries and unhygienic processes are involved in manual chipping of plantain. These problemsnecessitated the development of a motorised plantain chipping machine with a capacity of 450 kg/h. Themachine is made up of a cutting device, a feeding mechanism, the support frame and an electric motor as asource of power. The cutting mechanism consists of the stainless steel blades, a connecting rod, a guideframe for the blades and pulleys. The blades are arranged perpendicular to the plantain fingers. Duringperformance evaluation of the chipper, the effects of the number of cutting blades, inclination of the anglesof the cutting blades and cutting speed as they affected the chipping efficiency were investigated. ResponseSurface Methodology was used in the experiments because it uses very few experimental runs to describe howthe test variables affect the response. It also helps to determine the inter-relationships among the testvariables on the response and also helps to describe the combined effects of all the test variables on theresponse. The highest chipping efficiency of 70% was obtained when the machine was operated at the speedof 975 rpm, with a blade angle inclination of 300and with nine cutting blades. Generally, it was found thatthe chipping efficiency increased as the number of cutting blades are increased. Also the chipping efficiencyincreased with the speed of the machine but was not affected by the inclination angles of the blades. Thelinear effects of speed, the linear and quadratic effects of the number of blades significantly affected thechipping efficiency of the machine at 5% probability