DEVELOPMENT OF MORINGA (Moringa oleifera) SEED DEPODDER
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Date
2022-12-15
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University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore
Abstract
Moringa oleifera, belonging to the family of Moringaceae has various nutritional and medicinal values. Moringa seeds are oil bearers; thus, depodding operation need to be carried out before oil extraction. Depodding process is usually carried out manually, which consumes more time and results in a higher level of damage to the end product. In the above view, a power operated moringa seed depodder has been developed. Engineering properties of moringa pods such as length, breadth, thickness, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, 100 pod weight, bulk density, true density and porosity were determined at 6, 9 and 12% m.c. The developed depodder consists of main frame, feed hopper, cylinder, concave unit, electric motor and outlet. The main principle of the depodder is impact force due to the hammer mill
type cylinder. Performance evaluation of the depodder has been carried out with three different types of moisture content (6, 9 and 12%), cylinder speed (170, 200 and 230 rpm) and concave clearance (8.5, 11.5 and 14.5 mm). Depodder was tested for both graded and ungraded pods. The statistical design called Box-Behenken was employed for the experimentation. The maximum depodding efficiency, throughput capacity, whole kernel recovery and kernel damage obtained for graded pods was observed to be 93.35%, 29.05 kg/h, 85.86% and 11.68% respectively and for ungraded pods it was observed to be 92.00%, 30 kg/h, 85.60% and 13.52%. Optimization of depodder operating parameters was attempted using Design Expert software 12.0.3.0 based on desirability function and the theoretically
predicted optimum conditions were verified.