Development of a pedal operated breadfruit dehulling machine

ABSTRACT

Breadfruit (Treculia Africana) or simply breadnut is very important  both as food and as a potential source of oil. The economic  importance of this tropical seed on domestic and commercial basis  has necessitated the development of a pedal breadfruit dehuller, that  would reduce the Cost of maintaining and purchasing motorized dehuller, Solve the problem of fuel scarcity, inadequate electricity supply . In the engineering design of this machine, the action zone consisted  essentially of two disk; one adjustable and the other stationary. however The machine which is operated manually through human power of 89.48  Watt ,has a dehulling efficiency of 60% , 55% and 53%  at  6.5%,8.5% and 10.5% moisture content  respectively at (dry basis ) .The machine capacity was recorded as 37.5kg/h ,9.3kg/h and 4.16kg/h at 66.3 rpm, 56.7rpm and 37.5 rpm. This shows that efficiency increases with decrease in moisture content and capacity increases with increase in speed with 1% breakage. The total cost of the machine is 65,950 Naira.