PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A PALM KERNE NUT CRACKING MACHINE

Palm kernel, which is one of the by- products of palm tree is of great importance to the human race and highly sought for, because it contains oil which could be consumed directly or used as raw materials for other products. The plant is mostly found in the rain forest of Nigeria where the production ofª¤? palm kernel is not the major challenge, but the production ofª¤? clean and unbrokenª¤? kernel (high grade) to be sold to the palm kernel merchants who buy and supply to companies. The development of mobile palm kernel nut cracking machine was made to reduce drudgery, to enhance processing capacity and to determine processing loss. Palm kernel nut cracking occurs when nuts are loaded to rupture without crushing the embedded kernel. The aim of this research work was to assess the performance of the developed mobile palm kernel nut cracking machine. Total sample of four thousand (4,000) palm kernel nuts were divided into five groups of eight hundred palm kernel nuts and each group was further divided into four sub-groups of two hundred (200) palm kernel nuts.ª¤? Each group of five was fed into the hopper and cracked at different shaft speeds in revolutions per minute (rpm). The shaft speeds were determined with a tachometer and it was varied on the engine by adjusting the throttle lever. In a group of five, it was replicated for four different times at the same speed. The cracking efficiency and throughput capacity were calculated. The research work showed that the cracking efficiencies at speeds of 1200, 1800, 2200 and 2400 rpm were 98ª¤¡Þ0.3, 98.5ª¤¡Þ0.08, 98.5ª¤¡Þ0.01 and 99ª¤¡Þ0.04% respectively. The throughput of the machine increased from 10.91 to 38.00 g/s as the speed of the machine increased from 800 to 2400 rpm. Also the performance efficiencies of the developed machine were 93, 94, 95, 94.5 and 94% while the overall efficiencies were 90.86, 92.12, 93.58, 93.08 and 93.06% for the set speeds. It was concluded that the overall performance of this developed palm nut kernel cracking machine were effective because it fell within the range of betweenª¤? 90 to 98% overall efficiency.ª¤