DEVELOPMENT OF A GARLIC BULB SEPARATOR: 1. SEPARATING UNIT

IBRAHIM, M. M.

doi:10.21608/mjae.2013.102125

DEVELOPMENT OF A GARLIC BULB SEPARATOR: 1. SEPARATING UNIT

Document Type : Original Article

Author

M. M. IBRAHIM

Assist. Prof., Agric. Eng. Dept., Fac. of Agric., Cairo Univ., Egypt.

10.21608/mjae.2013.102125

Abstract

Garlic bulb separating is the unit operation through which cloves are separated to facilitate further processing. Conventional methods of clove separation are very laborious and time consuming. A garlic bulb separator was designed, fabricated and evaluated for its performance and techno-economic feasibility. Some physical and mechanical properties (dimensions, mass, volume, bulk density, angle of repose, static coefficient of friction and separation force) of garlic bulb that are pertinent to the mechanical processing were measured and considered by the design of the machine.
The developed machine was evaluated at three levels of cylinder speed (C_S) (0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 m s^-1), three levels of concave clearance (C_C) (20, 25 and 30 mm) and two levels of moisture content (M_C) of garlic bulb (61.5% and 70.3% w.b.). The evaluation was based on the following parameters: separation efficiency (SE), bulb damage (BD), machine capacity (P_m), required power (RP), consumed energy (CE) and cost.
The results recommended operating the machine at combinations of C_S=0.5 to 1 m s^-1, C_C =20 to 25 mm and M_C value of 61.5 % to maximum SE (87.8 %) with minimum BD (5.3 %). The garlic bulb separator increased the capacity to about 5.47 times and reduced the separating cost to about 69.23% comparing with manual method.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Agricultural Power and Machinery Engineering

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