Design and Development of an Instant Amala Making Machine with Control System Integration

Abstract

The most important factor in food production/processing is safety and quality in terms of hygiene and nutritional value. Processing of unripe plantain into finished product of Amala conventionally is laborious and unhygienic. This project named Design and development of an instant Amala making machine with control system integration was designed and fabricated to make Amala preparation an easy one and remove the fatigue usually experienced during manual preparation. The machine was designed for small scale use and it is capable of processing 15 fingers of unripe plantain pulp for 10 people. It has two compartments; the cooking/pounding and the electric motor/water reservoir. The machine was designed using Solidworks CAD software and computer programming using Micro C. After fabrication, the machine was tested and the result observed from the functional evaluation of the machine, shows that before implementation of control, the time recorded was 58 minutes and after incorporating control, it took 56 minutes, the overall operation time of the machine is lesser when compared to the processing of Unripe plantain into flour. It was observed that both took longer because of the thickness of the pot and the sizes to which each finger was reduced, using a kitchen knife. The machine minimizes human intervention and makes for hygienic processing of Amala. The colour observed from the final product of the operation is light brown which makes it pleasant looking, instead of the darkish brown colour usually observed from plantain flour. Further course of action is recommended as the machine as it is still a prototype.