Design and development of a manual potato cum sweet potato slicer

Promotion of small scale potato processing machinery in the potato growing region would be an opportunity to reduce post-harvest loss. Making potato chips making can be a potential processing technique at house hold and cottage industry levels. In spite of a high acceptance of chips among all ages of people, the number of small scale potato processing industries in Bangladesh is not notable. One of the main reasons for such outcome is the non-availability of low cost, simple and high capacity potato processing machinery like potato slicer at local market. Therefore, a manual potato slicer was designed and fabricated in Farm Machinery and Postharvest Process Engineering (FMPE) Division of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) during 2013-14. Overall dimension of the slicer was 360x390x780 mm. The slicing efficiency, throughput and non-uniform slices of the manual slicer for potato were found to be 88.80%, 59.90 kg/h and 11.22%, respectively. The capacity of the slicer for sweet potato was 42.93 kg/h. In consideration of cost, weight, ease of operation and capacity, the slicer was found suitable for cottage industry and restaurant uses.