Advancing Efficiency and Consistency in Agarwood Inoculum Production through Agarwood-Induce Inoculum Mixing Machine

Agarwood is a bio-resin that withstands a consistent market demand worldwide due to its exceptional formula of fragrant resin and rare essence of herbal aromatic compounds. However, the Agar-resin is formed only in the Thymalaeaceae family trees as a self-defense mechanism towards plant stress. In commercial-level agarwood production, artificial inoculation is essential for reliable agarwood production. However, the prevailing method of agar-based inoculum preparation has been plagued by the tedious, time-consuming, and poor texture of insufficient blending via particle blockages in the field operation is frequent. As such, this study invented a novel Agarwood-Induce Inoculum Mixing Machine addressing the shortcomings of the prevailing hand-held type mixing machine. The operation performance of both machines was systematically evaluated for the time required for a single bend, electrical energy consumption, and the quality of the final product. The results revealed a drastic reduction of time required for the completion single blend by 6 times i.e. from 18 minutes to 3 minutes by using the newly invented machine. The total electric energy savings for the completion of one batch of the blend was found to be 2.4 times (energy reduction from 0.48kWh to 0.2kWh) than the existing method. In addition to the two sample T-test results, a substantial reduction of time and energy with p-values close to zero (p<0.001), an exceptional quality homogeneous creamy foam of the final blend which is vital for a successful inoculation was received. The quality of the produced inoculum was rigorously assessed by a custom-formulated five-parameter index and 96.25% of the sample from the new machine and ranked “excellent" while the existing hand-mixing machine was with diverse performance. According to the chi-square test, there was a statistically significant difference (p<0.001) in the quality of the output inoculum between the two methods. The final blend of inoculum produced by the new machine was found to have exceptional quality homogeneous creamy foam texture which is vital for providing a hassle-free convenient operation background of the fields during the inoculation process.