Development of Automatic Chicken Cutting Machine

Purpose: Chicken cutting is done manually, which is inefficient, unhygienic, and carries a high accident risk during processing. This study develops and evaluates an automatic chicken cutting machine that suits small-scale workplaces. Methods: This study developed an automatic chicken cutting machine equipped with four traverse blades and two longitudinal blades. An experiment was conducted with various blade rotating speeds and tray feed rates to evaluate the machine's performance. The chicken loss rate and chicken piece weights were measured to calculate the coefficient of variation (CV), thereby determining processing uniformity. Results: The optimal cutting conditions with the smallest chicken loss rate were 0.05 m/s tray feed speed and 18.8 m/s and 16.4 m/s for the traverse and longitudinal blades, respectively. The processing ran at 55.3 chickens per hour and the chicken pieces were more uniform when using the device than for hand-work processed pieces. Conclusions: The loss rate increased in proportion to the cutting-blade rotation speed due to the high cutting rate in meat. The loss rate also increased as the tray feed speed slowed because the cutting blade pushed the chicken meat. The tray feed speed should be increased to improve the amount processed per hour.