Design and fabrication of a motorized cocoa pod splitting and separating machine.

Abstract

Cocoa is an important cash crop that serves numerous food purposes. The principal use and economic importance of cocoa is found in the industries of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals. beverages, soft drinks, flavoring agents and confectioneries. Cocoa powder is essentially used as flavor in cakes manufacture, biscuits, ice cream, dairy drinks (beverage industry) and in of coatings. for confectioners or frozen desserts. Husks are used as organic fertilizers and in liquid soap making (Caleb and Akinnuli, 2019). Splitting and removing the seed the pods is key to. its vast applications. In an attempt to ease the bottleneck in breaking the pods to release the seeds for utilization, a motorized cocoa pod splitting and separating machine is needed to efficiently split various sizes of cocoa. Fabrication was done using locally available materials to achieve reduction in production cost, stress and drudgery attributed to the manual methods of splitting. Different components of the machine were designed basing on the physical, mechanical and chemical properties of the cocoa pods. The essential components of the splitting and separating machine are the hopper, the splitting unit, the separating the frame, the power unit, driving mechanism and analyzing forces acting on the components to prevent failure. From the design, splitting unit operates at a speed of 270rpm and the separating unit at a speed of 330rpm with a total maximum transmitted power requirement of 3hp. After fabrication, the performance and economic analysis of the machine were performed in terms of machine efficiency of 8829%, percentage mass damage of 2.1%. Machine's total investment cost; Ugx„ 83,1800, the net present value of 1,437,013.913 and profitability index of I .73, and since NPV is greater than 0, the project is viable, owing to the performance and economic analysis of the machine, it achieves all its design purposes hence it is recommended for commercialization. and adoption by the target groups.