Design and construction of a banana juice extractor.

Abstract

Uganda is the second largest producer of bananas after India but most of these bananas are consumed as a staple food and less is diverted into extraction of banana juice. Banana juice can be extracted either manually or chemically however. in Uganda, manual extraction of banana juice by treading on bananas in a trough in the ground or kneading of the bananas in a large pan is accomplished by addition of turpentine or spear grass to the bananas. This. manual extraction of banana juice renders the juice to contamination with germs and also blood possibly from cuttings due to sharp edges of spear grass. This calls for provision of' a mechanized way of extracting banana juice. In this project, a machine was designed to adopt the traditional wav of extracting juice from bananas using grass and hands The designed machine -was fabricated to demonstrate and test its performance and efficiency. Although it had been designed to be motorized it was discovered during fabrication that it can well be manually driven while retaining the same, designed parameters. It was tested on two banana varieties, that is; kayinja and bogoya and two grass varieties namely spear grass and turpentine grass (etteete). It extracted liters of juice from 3kg of bogoya and 1/4 liters of juice from 3/4 kg of kayinja. Its efficiency on each of the banana variety used was calculated and found to be 67% while the output capacity could not be established as it depends on the driving power and the variety and conditions of bananas to be processed While the proto type cost 829,200Shs to fabricate and test, the designed machine was evaluated cost 2,025.000Shs and the economic analysis for the viability and feasibility of someone investing in this machine was carried out and found to be viable. The overall project. incurred an expense of l, 491,700Shs to execute. Key words: Bananas, banana juice, construction, designing, economic analysis, efficiency, extractor, kneading, prototype, squeezing mechanism, treading, viability.