Design and construction of a manually operated mulberry leaf chopping machine.

Abstract

This report deals the development and testing of a manually operated mulberry leaf chopping machine. The existing methods of cutting mulberry leaves like using a knife, a motorized power chopper and motorized leaf cutter are prone to accidents, labour, time consuming consumes power and requires two to operate. A mulberry leaf chopper is a machine used in sericulture centres (places where they rear silkworms). This used by Silk farmers and sericulture centres.it is manually driven by rotating a handle clockwise direction in relation to the feeder. The mulberry chopping machine of a feeder hopper with 400x240x400mm, shaft diameter moving knife 300x60x4mm. A mulberry chopping machine capacity 0.5kg/min was designed. The chopper was tested with a to increasing the cutting efficiency and reducing on the cost of power in comparison with traditional method of cutting leaves and motorized one. It was observed that the maximum cutting efficiency of 93.7% can be achieved by cutting mulberry leaves. The successful development of this machine is meant to reduce on accidents, increase on efficiency and no power consumption compared with the traditional method of threshing finger Billet and therefore increase productivity of farmers. The total initial cost of the mulberry leaf chopping machine is 511,680 UGX with a profit margin (23% of the grand total of costs) inclusive, includes cost of material and labour. The investment in the leaf chopper has a payback period of 3 weeks. Since the payback period of the machine is less than the estimated machine of 4 years, therefore the machine is economically viable.