Open AccessDEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A SMALL-SCALE GROUNDNUT SHELLING MACHINE
Author(s) -
O. Z. Ayodeji,
A. A. Adegun,
S. A. Anjorin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
federal university of technology akure journal of engineering and engineering technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2636-6045
DOI - 10.51459/futajeet.2021.15.2.312
Subject(s) - productivity , agricultural engineering , production (economics) , agriculture , scale (ratio) , unit (ring theory) , arachis , developing country , agricultural science , business , mathematics , operations management , engineering , economics , environmental science , agronomy , geography , economic growth , biology , mathematics education , cartography , archaeology , macroeconomics
Food serves as one of the requirements for the survival of every living being. It exists in various forms and one of this is Groundnut. Groundnut (Arachis hypogea), apart from being considered for food, creates jobs and sources of income for the teeming populace and contributes to GDP of the countries where grown; its contributions to the national growth increase when its production is mechanized. However, in spite of the use of mechanized method of farming, the contributions are still low in developing countries, compared to the developed countries. Some of the factors responsible for this center on the fact that the available machineries are for turkey projects, which are expensive and as such they are viewed irrelevant among the small scale stakeholders in the developing nations, based on the quantity of their produce. In order to find solution to some of these challenges, the present study utilizes the characteristics of both nuts and shells of groundnuts to develop and evaluate the performance of a 20 kg/h groundnut shelling machine. The machine comprises five basic units, namely: the hopper, neck, shelling unit, power transmission unit and frame. The developed machine with a theoretically loading capacity of 2.5 kg/batch, required average of 58.02 minutes to shell the rated capacity to attain shelling efficiency of 80.39 % with loss of 3.125 % due to crushing. Findings show that the minimum productivity of the machine is 20.666 kg/hr, which improves as the moisture content of the feedstock reduces.