Umudike Journal of Engineering and Technology

A motorized African oil bean slicing machine was developed by the authorswith locally available materials and evaluated for performance. The tests include the determination of the slicing efficiency, percentage of even/uniform slices, percentage damage, percentage recovery and throughput capacity of the machine under a combination of feed rate at three levels of 2, 4,and 6kg/min; and shaft/cutter speed at three levels of 100,200 and 300rpm. According to the results obtained, the most optimum operating condition of the slicer was at the cutter speed of 200rpm and feed rate of 4kg/min. Under this cutter speed and feed rate, the slicer had the highest efficiency of 96.21%, percentage even/uniform slices of 98.21%, percentage uneven slices and minimal material damages of 1.7% and 0.09% respectively. Also at the same cutter speed and feed rate, the device recorded the highest percentage of sliced material recovery of 99.93% and throughput capacity of 89.52kg/hr. The ANOVA results obtained showed that the feed rate was highly significant on the slicing efficiency at 5% and 1% probability levels while the cutter speed and the interaction between the cutter speed and the feed rate had no significant effect on the efficiency of the machine.