Development and performance evaluation of roller type semi continuous fish descaling machine

Abstract

Indian fisheries are one of the important sectors in terms of its contribution to the national economy. In view of the importance of fish processing, a semi continuous roller type fish descaling machine (FDM) was developed to address the needs of small fish farmers and vendors of inland fisheries sector. The components of the roller type FDM such as scalp roller assembly, shaper bracket assembly, support frame, different kinds of rollers viz., conveyor and descaling rollers were designed. The size of the rollers and number of rollers were designed based on length and width of fish weighing around 800±50 g. Performance evaluation of the FDM was carried out for selected speed levels of conveyor and descaling rollers. The maximum descaling efficiency of 83.7% was achieved for optimum conveyor roller speed (7.54 m min‑1) and descaling roller speed (56.52 m min‑1) with desirability value of 0.960. The capacity of FDM for the maximum descaling efficiency was found to be 66.4 kg h-1 with power consumption of 0.78 kWh. The cost of the machine was computed as ₹ 2,04,500 with cost of operation of ₹ 5.57 kg-1. The machine operation was found to be economical and quite comparable to manual operation cost of ₹ 15 and ₹ 4.76 for drum type descaler as reported by Delfia et al., (2019). The machine could remove the fish scales effectively and was enabling to collect scales separately in a clean and hygienic way for further value addition of the fish products and by products.