JETI Admin2
Abstract
The melon (egusi) seed (Colocynthis citrullus, L) is protein-rich seeds gotten from cucurbitaceous plants and its widely used in most West African countries as soup ingredients food and other industrial purposes. Manual removal of the shell is laborious, time consuming, and slow especially when large quantity of seed is involved. The study presents the improved design and construction of a melon shelling machine for household and commercial usage. The previous designs suffer from low shelling efficiency, high energy consumption, and high machine cost. This present design offer consistency in labour saving, adaptability, durability and energy efficiency in decorticating of the seeds. Although research works has made numerous improvements in the mechanization of the shelling operation, however to advance this improvements, this research work provided an improved egusi shelling machine which eliminates some design errors such as low work rate ratio, design limitations and damage ratio . Study shows that some research works / designs are not practicable, thus only exist on theoretical papers, some has high seed breakage / damage ratio, low operational efficiency of less than 60% etc. This is because these previously designed mostly have sealed or permanently joined shelling chambers, which, in addition to aforementioned demerits makes the cleaning of the chamber after use difficult and expensive to fabricate. The machine was constructed using locally available materials and it consist of the following machine member parts, Hopper, Frame, Shelling Chamber and Prime mover. A test analysis for performance evaluation was performed using different moisture content of 10, 13 and 15% bd and at different shelling speed of 2500 and 1500rpm. While performance evaluation was carried out. Results obtain shows that 15% moisture content and a speed of 1500rpm the efficiency of the machine is at 90.6 %. This Machine is of a low cost, user friendly, rapid operation and lesser seed damage. It can serve both domestic and industrial purposes.
References
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