Design and construction of a pedalled and hand driven cassava chipping machine
MetadataShow full item record
Cassava is the second most important staple crop in Uganda. The crop is recognized as a major agricultural commodity for poverty eradication, ensuring food and nutrition security and as an industrial raw material. However the has a problem of a high post-harvest loss due to its bulkiness and a high moisture content. However this can be overcome by a size reduction process (chipping) which encourages and eases further process like transportation and drying, several cassava chipping machines ranging from the manual type to the motorized have been designed and fabricated to achieve this purpose. The manual cassava chippers like the pedalled and hand driven are the type of chippers that rely on energy drown from man, although they are cheap, they are usually non effective since some of them are design to suit only men that is to say the pedalled yet chipping of the cassava is majorly done by women, produce non uniform chips and are normally associated with drudgery that is to say the hand driven. The fabricated machine looks at solving this problem in order to improve production among rural farmers. The main objective of this project is to design, construct and test the efficiency of the pedalled and hand driven cassava chipper while the specific objectives are to design the different component parts of the chipping machine, to construct the pedalled and hand driven cassava chipper prototype and to test the efficiency of the constructed prototype which was achieved by taking into consideration of the various design considerations, force analysis calculation, mechanism and material selection plus carrying out various fabrication activities like cutting, welding and machining. The fabricated pedalled and hand driven cassava chipper prototype was test and found to produce 3mm thick cassava chips with an efficiency of 97% and a chipping rate of 86.88 kg/hr hence it being effective and efficient.