Design and fabrication of unripe jackfruit dicing equipment.

Abstract

Jackfruit has long been one of the most commonly consumed fruits in Uganda. There has been a rise in the number of vegetarians worldwide, which has increased demand for plant-based alternatives to meat and other animal products. Jackfruit’s flesh has a texture that’s reminiscent of shredded meat and is preferred when it is an unripe fruit, which is when it is hard, pale green and starchy, and meat-like in texture and is very versatile and absorbs the flavors of the spices it’s cooked with. It is chopped into meat like cubes manually with knives before drying, spicing and preparation which exposes the jackfruit to contamination by human hands, tiresome and makes the operator’s hands covered with sap. This calls for the need to design the jackfruit dicing equipment to minimize human handling which was done by designing a manually operated dicing equipment, fabricating and testing its performance. The strength of tender jackfruit was determined from the lab using a texture analyzer to determine the force required to dice the jackfruit and different components of the equipment were sized. The prototype of the machine was designed in solid works and fabricated from Kabanyolo workshop. The equipment was tested and it was observed to produce 71% of the targeted quantity of definite dices of jackfruit with an average throughput capacity of 113.2kg/hr. The time taken to dice 1000g of jackfruit for the three runs using the dicing equipment ranged from 29 seconds to 35 seconds. The dicing efficiency when using the dicing equipment ranged from 68% to 74% and the average dicing efficiency was 71%. Then, the throughput capacity while using the dicing equipment ranged from 102.9kg/hr to 124.1kg/hr and the average throughput capacity was 113.2kg/hr.