Electrical corn roaster machine.

Abstract

Maize is one of the major staple foods in Uganda, providing over 45% of Ugandan’s daily calorie consumption. To meet the country’s maize demand, most farmers grow some maize on their land, with over two million Ugandans counting on maize as their main source of income. Maize can be consumed when fresh or dry or processed into a variety of food and industrial products, including starch, sweeteners, oil, beverages, glue, industrial alcohol, and fuel ethanol. Sweet corn is the most common variety of maize eaten directly off the cob. The ear is picked while the endosperm is in the "milk stage" so that the kernels are still tender. Ears of corn are steamed or boiled, usually without green husks, or roasted. In Uganda, there are many methods of preparing maize which includes boiling, steaming, grilling, and roasting. There are different methods of roasting maize which include the use of an electrical corn roaster, the existing corn roaster is slow because it requires the manual turning of maize and also consumes a lot of power thus the need to construct a time-efficient machine to save time. This can be achieved through the following method; selection of the material, design of the various components, fabrication of the parts, assembling the parts, testing of the machine performance, and carrying out an economic evaluation for the project. At the end of this study, an electrical corn roaster will be constructed and the facility will be in a position to ensure; time efficiency due to the ability to rotate maize automatically using a dc motor driven by electricity as opposed to the existing project which requires changing the maize manually.