The Design and Performance of Continuous Porang (Amorphophallus muelleri Blume) Flour Mills

Indonesian Porang flour (Amorphophallus muelleri Blume) is made into glucomannan flour because of its beneficial health effects. However, the challenge in producing flour is calcium oxalate which must be eliminated, because it can irritate the skin and may cause a kidney stones if the flour is consumed. Over the past 10 years, several batch grinding methods have been used to produce good quality Porang flour. However, there has been no research on the continuous method of grinding Porang flour using a ball mill. Both the stamp mill and batch type ball mill processes had low production capacities. Therefore, the aim of this work is to design a Continuous Porang Flour Mill (CPFM) machine and test its performance for Porang flour production. The CPFM machine consists of a continuous ball mill and a cyclone separator. The experiments were carried out at a ball mill rotation speed of 65 ± 1 rpm, with a capacity of up to 780.67 g / h input of chip material, producing an output of 33.1 - 57.1%. The CPFM meets the low-temperature grinding requirements but is still needed to provide acoustic hearing protection for the operator due to the high level of loudness. CPFM produces Porang flour with glucomannan levels ranging from 80.79% to 87.79% and calcium oxalate ranging from 0.12% to 0.29%. The calcium oxalate content overall was under 0.3%, which is better compared when compared to other milling methods