Design and Fabrication of Fresh Lotus Seed Dehusking Machine
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Abstract
Lotus Seed Dehusking Machine was designed in order to continue working after the lotus seed separating machine. The machine consists of an angle steel frame with two main mechanisms- bucket conveyor unit, and blading unit. The optimum speeds of the bucket conveyor unit and the blading unit were considered. The blading unit which allows the blade to cut around the lotus seed to increase the percentage of dehusked seeds was designed. The blading unit consists of 5 tracks. Each track has 3 slitting blades with 2 mm. above the track. Bucket conveyor will feed lotus seeds from the Lotus Seed Separating Machine to the blading unit in Lotus Seed Dehusking Machine. After that the lotus seed will flow into blading unit, which has blades installed in the center of the tracks. The belt will convey and press the lotus seed to be cut. The husk of lotus seed will be cut and the lotus seed will be dropped into the outlet. In the experiment, the bucket conveyor speed was set at 4.8, 5.8 and 7.2 m/s and the speed of blading unit was set at 1.3, 1.6 and 1.9 m/s. respectively. The result revealed that the optimum speed of the bucket conveyor unit of 5.8 m/s and the blading unit speed of 1.6 m/s resulted in the highest percentage of dehusked seeds at 87 and working capacity was 5.55 kg/h. An engineering economic analysis showed that it cost 27,359 baht at 640 working hours per year. If the dehusking wage is 25 baht/kg, the payback period will be 2.5 months and the break-even point of the machine considered from the dehusked lotus seed weight will be 0.1 ton/year.
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