DEVELOPMENT OF A MANUALLY OPERATED DOUGH DICING MACHINE FOR COLD EXTRUSION

The timely production of diced dough for the final preparation of chin-chin (a confectionery made of fried dough) have not witnessed any substantial development among the women folk that engaged in such activities in Nigeria. A manually operated dough-dicing machine was designed and developed for the timely production of diced dough. The dough dicer offers a better method of dicing dough into various desired shapes and lengths, which may not be possible with the existing processing method. Preliminary test of the manually operated dough dicer showed that a minimal pressure of 4473.122 Pa is sufficient to force out the dough through the die outlet. The low cost dough dicer requires the minimum manual power input of 0.16 Watt for the dicing of the dough with a density of 1126.4 Kg/m 3 . The overall performance of the manually operated dough dicer showed that the machine would be of great benefit to the small scale producers of the confectionery.