Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering and Applied Sciences: Research Areas

Abstract:
The processing of soya bean seed into several by-products such as soya-meal, flour, edible oil, confectionary, akara, moi-moi, dawadawa etc requires diverse processing sequence. While the soya conversion to edible oil and flour require toasted condition, the production of soya milk, confectionary, akara, moi moi, dawadawa etc require direct wet processing. The rural dwellers in Nigeria are more in tune to the soya wet processing sequence. The operations here are mostly manual, requiring much labour and time resulting in low productivity in processing. In order to mechanize this processing sequence to some extent, a wet soya bean de-coating machine was conceptualized, designed, fabricated and tested. In this machine, the wet soya bean seeds are de-coated in between two padded rollers (dynamic and static rollers) that sandwiches an abrasive fabric material. The static roller has vertical and horizontal adjustment which helps to create a vertical angular displacement between its axis and the axis of the dynamic roller immediately above it. The machine was tested at several angular displacements of the rollers ranging from 5 -350 with optimum angle being 200. 5kg of wetted soya bean seeds of moisture content 65% in each case was used for the test runs. The results of the test runs were tabulated and analysis showed 90% de-coating efficiency. It is expected that this machine would help improve productivity soya bean wet processing. Its cost of N80, 000 ($516.16) also encourages development of Micro scale industries in Nigeria.

Keywords: soya bean, wet de-coating, angular displacement, rollers, fabric material.

Download full paper