Design and construction of a manually operated jack fruit pulping machine for small scale processors.

Abstract

Today’s consumers with busy lifestyles need development of value added products owing to the fruit’s sticky sap exuded from the rinds, voluminous size, strong aroma and laborious preparation operations. Marketing and consumption of jackfruit is done locally as whole-fruit on a large scale or minimally processed products whereby the fruits bulbs are separated from the whole-fruit and consumed fresh. Jack fruit processes include; slicing, pulping, drying and canning to help prolong their shelf life for preparation of value added products (Chowdhury et al.). A manual pulping machine is thus required so as to extract pulp which is used in the making of jam; juice which is consumed is utilized as a soft drink (cocktail) when mixed with other fruit juices. In a day a minimum number of 10 jack fruits having a capacity of 20kg/hr can be worked on to produce a pulp efficiency of 65%. The pulping machine can be used by all groups of people thus isn’t gender sensitive and can be affordable to small scale processors. This report contains chapter one which brings out the background on jackfruits, objectives of the study, the problem statement as well as its justification. Chapter two highlights the existing technologies available for pulping jackfruits and explains why the theories exist and their related constraints. Chapter three explains the steps that enabled me achieve the objectives of the project and how they were evaluated. While chapter four entails the results obtained well discussed and chapter five contains conclusions and recommendations. The scope of the project involved pulping jackfruit bulbs to extract both juice and pulp to be used in the production of value added products. The objective of the study was to design, construct, test and assess the economic evaluation of a manual jackfruit pulping machine