Evaluating the Performance of the Carrot Slicer Machine

The study was carried out to evaluate the performance of the carrot slicer machine. An experiment was conducted with a multi-factor factorial design under a randomized complete block design. Using the Statistix 8 software, the experiments' collected data were statistically examined. The analysis of variance indicated that the effects of machine speed and feed rate on throughput capacity, efficiency, and percentage loss of the machine were significant at the 5% probability level. The results of the least significant difference pairwise comparison tests revealed that the treatment combination means did not differ significantly from one another at the 5% level. The key physical properties of the carrot including moisture content, angle of repose, bulk density, porosity, coefficient of friction, geometric mean diameter, arithmetic mean diameter, equivalent mean diameter, sphericity, surface area and aspect ratio were obtained as 84.3%, 39.4°, 469.5 kg m-3, 59.8%, 0.78, 47.8 mm, 62.18 mm, 83.7 mm, 0.55, 57.67 cm2, and 0.27, correspondingly. The results showed that the maximum throughput capacity of 621.4 kg h-1 was recorded at 550 rpm machine speed while the minimum throughput capacity of 511.6 kg h-1 was recorded at 350 rpm machine speed. It has been found that the maximum machine efficiency was 96.03% at 550 rpm machine speed whereas the minimum machine efficiency was 92.5% at 350 rpm machine speed. The investigation results revealed that the minimum percentage loss was 4.2% at 550 rpm machine speed whereas the maximum percentage loss was 7.8% at 350 rpm machine speed. The test results suggested that the carrot slicer machine was found to be very effective for processing the vegetable root crop of carrots for end users.