Development of dehydrator and grider for aromatic spices/ Almarie Jonara M. Gamboa, Kyle Malabag, Mary Austin Q. Marquez, Hector DG. Pedros and Aaron Harold B. Ramos.--

Bachelor's thesis

College of Industrial Technology.-- Bachelor of Engineering Technology major in Mechanical Technology: Technological University of the Philippines, Manila. 2023

Includes bibliographic references and index.

The study, development of dehydrator and grinder for aromatic spices, aims to produce an effective equipment that can dehydrate and grind aromatic spice to increase its shelf life and give opportunities to farmers to increase the market value of their produce and their revenue. The dehydrator and grinder for aromatic spices include 3 divisions, dehydrator division, grinder division, and control panel arranged from top to bottom. To test its effectiveness, each operation is compared to its manual counterpart – dehydration to sun drying and grinding to mortar and pestle grinding. The aromatic spices used for this prototype are onion, garlic, and chili. In addition, the factors tested and compared are drying capacity for the dehydration and material recovery for the grinding. All of these are statistically compared using T-test. The moisture content of the final product is also identified if it reached their respective standards. Based on the results, the difference between sun drying and the dehydrator division is significantly different in all the aromatic spices, while the difference between the material recovery of the usage of mortar and pestle and the grinder division is significantly different in chili only. All the aromatic spices dehydrated in the prototype reached their respective standards. The prototype is evaluated in its terms of its functionality, workability, economy, aesthetics, and safety by 30 evaluators and gave an overall rating of 4.44 with a descriptive rating of “Very Satisfactory”. This indicates that the prototype performs as expected.