PERFORMANCE OF A SMALL-SCALE HAND-CRANKED MACHINE FOR MAIZE SHELLING

The aim of this study is to investigate some operational factors relevant to the development of small-sized hand-operated maize shelling machine to be suitable for the Egyptian rural communities. The performance of the developed machine had been done by changing the power source, the rotational speed of shelling disc and cage pressure. However, the following technical indicators had been estimated such as machine productivity, shelling efficiency, visibly damaged kernels percent of maize, shelling energy and operating cost of the maize shelling machine. The results indicated that the most important factors found to affect maize shelling is the rotational speed of shelling disc. Developed machine productivity was found to be 24.8 kg/h, shelling efficiency was 94.2%., visibly damaged kernels percent of maize was 2%, energy consumed in shelling operation was 0.92 kJ/kg. It could be concluded that using the developed sheller increased the machine productivity to 1:1.72 and reduced the cost of maize shelling to 1:1.6 as compared with the manual method.