Energy requirements for cutting of selected vegetables: A review

Abstract

This work presented a review of energy requirements for cutting different vegetables in order to obtain products that can easily lend themselves to further processing. From the review, the role of some parameters related to cutting tool geometry such as blade sharpness, slicing angle, blade edge geometry, contact length, depth of cut, cutting speed, blade shape and the engineering properties of the vegetables such as crop variety, maturity stage, moisture content, average diameter, average length, average width and fibre orientation were seen to affect the operation of cutting in terms of energy consumption and the overall efficiency of the cutting operation. Works on the estimation of energy requirements for cutting different agricultural products by adopting various methods such as universal testing machine having the cutting tool attached for potato (2.36J), carrot (4.55J), raddish (1.23J), cucumber (1.19J), bitter gourd (4.56J), pointed gourd (1.28J), bell pepper (1.83J), onion (2.36J), aubergine (7.72J); cutting with a texture analyzer for different pepper cultivars (0.085J-0.471J); cutting with special equipment like Zwick/Roell stand for carrot (1.82J - 10.13J) etc and the factors affecting their energy requirement were reported. Generally, obtained results showed that with cutting speed ranging from 20mm/min to 50mm/min on a cutting tool and sharpening angle ranging between 0^o to 45^o, the minimum energy requirement for cutting the selected vegetables under review was found to be between 0.085J and 10.13J. One major prospect for future work from the findings of this review work will be extensive studies on the energy requirement for cutting vegetables (leaf, fruit and root) with known physical characteristics and parameters of the cutting tool and the development of their mathematical models.