Design and Development of a Castor Seed Shelling and Separation Machine with Finite Element Analysis of the Shelling Drum

Abstract

The development and performance evaluation of a locally developed castor seeds shelling and separating machine was carried out with a view of modelling its shelling drum. The machine was developed to reduce the drudgery associated with the processing of castor seeds and has two major units, the shelling and the separation unit. A separation unit was incorporated to facilitate cleaning and separation of the seeds from the chaffs while the finite element analysis of the shelling drum was performed to ensure that it satisfies all the design criteria and it does not fail during operation. The performance of the machine was evaluated using two different varieties of castor seeds (Brazilian white and Brazilian black and white) at three different speeds (235, 260 and 300 rpm) and two concave clearance (10 and 15 mm) using 1000 g of both castor varieties. The evaluation was reported using shelling efficiency (74 to 94.4 %), seed recovery (25.2 to 59.4 %), separation efficiency (64.8 to 96.8 %) and percentage damage (4.8 to 57.2 %) as the performance indices. It can be concluded, that the developed machine performed better at 260 rpm and 15 mm concave clearance compared to the other speeds and concave clearance.