Design and development of maize peeler for farmers in Bangladesh

Abstract

Hand peeling of maize is common practice before shelling in Bangladesh. The main problems of hand peeling are that these require more time and increase labour cost. A maize peeling machine has been designed and fabricated in Farm Machinery and Postharvest Process Engineering Divisional workshop, BARI, Gazipur during 2016-2017 which reduce the human power in peeling operation of maize. This maize peeler can be very helpful for medium and small scale farmer. Two rubber and two spiral rollers were used for peeling of cobs. The functional parts of the machine are hopper, spiral roller and rubber roller. For the peeling operation moisture content of maize cobs were taken 20%- 24% (w b). The peeling capacities of the manual and power peelings were 87 kg/h and 1008 kg/h respectively when moisture content of maize cobs was 22% (wb). The highest peeling capacity was 1107 kg/h when the moisture content of the maize cob was 20 % (wb). The average machine speeds were found to be 1.41m/s. During peeling operation, it was observed that 1% of grains were injured and 3.2 % of maize cobs were found to be unhusked which is very negligible. The efficiency of the machine was found to be 96 %.