Determination of some engineering properties of fresh and boiled oil 6 palm fruits

Palm fruit is a product of oil palm and consists of the nut, the kernel, the fibre, oil and water. These components are separated by way of processing to get the desired products. For rational design of the handling systems, the engineering properties of the products are very important. A research was carried out to determine some engineering properties of fresh and boiled palm fruits. The properties determined are moisture content, sphericity solid and bulk densities, porosity, angles of repose and coefficients of friction. One thousand samples of the products were selected, conditioned and used for the experiments. The geometric and arithmetic mean diameters, volume, size and spherisity were calculated from the axial dimensions. The moisture contents were determined using gravimetric method. The angles of repose and coefficients of friction were determined on wood, glass and metal surfaces. The solid and bulk densities, porosity and compressive strength were determined using standard procedure. Results gave average moisture content of the fresh fruits to be 24.63 % and that of the boiled as 15.25 %. For the arithmetic and geometric mean diameters, the results were 1.9 cm and 580.6 cm respectively (fresh); 2.05 cm and 965.77 cm respectively (boiled), The average sphericities were calculated to be 70.7 % (fresh), and 73.28 % (boiled),. The average solid and bulk densities were 1.66 g/cm3 and 0.00054 g/cm3 respectively for fresh fruits, 1.32 g/cm3 and 0.00054 g/cm3 for the boiled product. The porosities of the samples were 60.21 % (fresh), and 75.73 % (boiled), The average values for the angles of repose on wood were 20.8 0 (fresh), 22.81 0(boiled), On glass, the angles of repose were 18.09 0 (fresh), 21.99 0 (boiled), On the metal surface, the angles of repose were 19.45 0 (fresh), 21.7 0 (boiled), The coefficients of static friction on wood were 0.38 (fresh), and 0.42 (boiled), On glass surface, the coefficient of static friction were 0.33 (fresh), 0.44 (boiled) while that of metals surface gave the coefficient of static friction were 0.35 (fresh), 0.4 (boiled)