Abstract:
At present, the lotus leaf tea is an One Tambol One Product (OTOP) of many communal enterprises in
Thailand. It becomes a health product that is widely available in both domestic and international markets. The
lotus leaf cutting process for treating tea quality still mainly relies on manual labors these days, but it has been
replaced with machines. Therefore, this research aimed to design and build lotus leave cutting machine that can reduce the processing time and labor cost in the lotus leaf cutting process for better lotus leaf tea production.
The study was based on the research about lotus leaf farmers and the physical characteristics of the lotus
leaves. The prototype consisted of a machine of feeder brochure power transmission Geneva system and gear
motor of 150 watt and related components. The power of the machine started when the operator input the lotus
leaves into the hind feeder of the machine. Then the lotus leaves were transported into the cutter set processed by the Geneva mechanism. The cutter set could cut the lotus leaves along the horizontal axis. After that, the lotus leaves were cut into pieces of 4x4 centimeters and released down to the outlet in front of the machine.
The results revealed that the best average cutting speed of blade was 1 meter/minute in 5 layers of lotus
leaves among all the trials at different average cutting speed rates of blades 0.5, 0.75 and 1 meter/minute and
numbers of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 layers, respectively. The cutting percentage was 98.90% without any leaf damage with a working capacity of 8.58 kilograms/hour that consumed 92.40 Watt-hours. The engineering economic analysis showed that on average it cost 5.31 baht/kilogram at 1,440 hours/year with a 6.4 - month payback and 40.50 hours/year for a break-even point. This prototype could work 4.3 times faster than human labor.