SELECTED PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF AFRICAN PEAR SEED FOR CONSIDERING IN DESIGN OF MECHANICAL EXPELLER
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Date
2016
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Published by Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN)
Abstract
The study was conducted to investigate the physical properties of African pear seeds, the flesh African pear seed was purchased from Ojo market in Ibadan and mesocarps of the fruits were removed to obtain the nuts. The nuts were dried under ambient conditions for several days, the actual moisture content of the nuts at the time of experimentation was determined, using KT100S Moisture Meter with measuring range of 5-35% to be 21.50%. The nuts were sorted into three
grades: small, medium and large, based on the visual physical assessment of their sizes. The three principal axial dimensions of 250 nuts from each grade were measured using a vernier caliper. In this study some selected physical properties of African pear seeds were determined which are essential for designing engineering processes, material handling, storage, equipment design and fabrication. The physical properties, namely, arithmetic mean diameter, geometric
mean diameter, surface area, sphericity, aspect ratio, true density and bulk density were determined. Also, angle of repose and coefficient of friction were tested on mild steel, plywood and PVC plastic which are probable engineering materials for construction of food processing equipment. The results revealed that average geometric mean diameters of the nuts are 25.22, 30.74 and 35.26 mm for the small, medium and large size grades respectively. The nuts are fairly ellipse with average sphericity of 0.54, 0.54 and 0.59 for the small, medium and large size grades respectively while true and bulk density0.96 g/cm3 and 1.14 g/cm3 respectively. The angles of repose were 40.99, 47.92 and 47.53 small, medium and large size respectively. These findings can provide the information that could be helpful for development of mechanical expeller or processing machines.
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Busari R. A. and J.O. Olaoye (2016): Selected Physical Properties of African Pear Seed for Considering in Design of Mechanical Expeller; ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences; 11 (8): 5463 – 5468.