Design and Development of a Tebaloi Processing Machine: A Preliminary Study

Tebaloi is a traditional snack of the Melanau people of Sarawak, East Malaysia. It is made mainly from the Sago flour extracted from the Sago palm tree. It is produced with traditional methods, which are both tedious and time-consuming, and it uses many natural resources like banana leaves in its production. The rare source of available literature on tebaloi processing makes it difficult to find out more information about tebaloi mechanization, except that all tebaloi manufacturers are using machines that are not designed for tebaloi processing. To date, there is no available machine in the market to manufacture tebaloi from the dough. Therefore, the present study aimed to design, build, and test a novel tebaloi machine. Unlike other foods such as noodle and pasta, tebaloi dough contains different ingredients and has a different viscosity making it difficult to process in conventional machines. Also, the mechanization processing requirements are significantly dependent on production size, cost, and benefits. In the present study, we came up with suitable design for the tebaloi-making requirements in particular for rolling, compression and cutting applications. For those purposes, the performance of the machine is evaluated at five different motor speeds viz. 217, 380, 470, 520, and 610 revolution per minute (rpm) representing Case I, II, III, IV, and V, respectively. The main outcome from the present research is three-fold: (1) time consumption of rolling and cutting processes reduced about 87% when employing the machine at a wide range of operating speeds; (2) the slices per minute of tebaloi production increases with rpm of the motor speed; and (3) the production rate of the tebaloi processing machine is increased about 22% for each case as compared to the conventional method.