| dc.description.abstract | Aquaculture is the fastest growing form of animal husbandry in the world with 11% growth rate recorded over the last decade. Aquaculture has been seen as an important new source of food fish for the poor. Demand for fish has increased worldwide as populations have grown, incomes have increased and the nutritional benefits of fish have become better known to people. So, it can be easily understood that fish has been one of the foods of preference. Hence in the preparation of processing fish as a food requires some precautions and procedures such as fish scaling, washing, cleaning, and cutting, being handled by several machine setups.
Removal of fish scales which can also be referred to as descaling is considered as one of the most important unit operations during pre-processing of fish. Generally, the descaling of fish is done manually i.e. by use of the human hand with help of a sharp cutting tool like a knife, which is not only a time consuming operation but also frequently causes harm and wounds to the hands of the person involved in performing the task. Designing of a fish de-scaler will therefore pave way for reducing the human drudgery and also hygienic handling of fish. In this project, the design and construction of a fish descaling machine is under taken. The project mainly aims at producing a domestic machine setup which simplifies the manual work done by the human hands, and to provide a specific function of descaling 10-30 pieces of fish (per time), at minimal operational costs.
Fish descaling can be carried out using different techniques depending on the type of fish to be descaled and on the nature of scales possessed by the fish being scaled. In this report, an effort was made to make an elaboration on the different scaling techniques that already exist, and the different innovations made on both manual and automatic fish descaling machines.
Basing on the information and data obtained from the literature about the existing techniques and innovations, and from the market research that I carried out to study the existing market and level of usage on the machine by various categories of customers, some of the design factors that I have considered in my project are, effort required, cost, efficiency, time and quality over performance. | en_US |
