Development and Performance Evaluation of Manually Operated Star Fruit Slicer

Abstract

Star fruit (Averrhoa carambola) is one of the underutilized tropical fruits, which contains large amount of therapeutic components in form of antioxidants, total phenolics, vitamin-C, minerals and dietary fibres. For commercial value-addition of the fruit, a hand-operated star fruit slicer suitable for small-scale processing was designed and developed. The slicer was evaluated for three fruit-slice thickness. The capacity, efficiency, loss percentage and standard slice percentage of the slicer varied with thickness. The slicer had slicing efficiency of 86 to 96% with effective capacity of about 30.18 - 7.46 kg.h-1 against 31 to 34% and 6.9 - 1.61 kg.h-1 by manual operation. The loss percentage and standard slice yield percentages were 9.53% to 15.11%, 83% to 91%, respectively, for mechanical; and 9.21% to 10.45%, 26% to 31%, respectively, for manual slicing. The results suggested that the developed star fruit slicer is simple, economical and more efficient with higher capacity than manual slicing for the range of fruit slice thickness required by small-scale processing units.