COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF MESH SIEVE PERFORMANCE OF A WET CEREAL SLURRY SIEVING MACHINE

摘要

This paper presents the design, construction and comparative performance evaluation a cereal slurry sieving machine. For the evaluation, wet slurries of maize, millet and sorghum were each sieved with three sieves of mesh sizes of 1.19 mm, 1.00 mm and 0.354 mm. The machine performed satisfactorily in the sieving of wet maize slurry, recording an efficiency of 85%. The output capacity was 22.07 kg/hr in comparison with 8.82 kg/hr achieved in the traditional manual method. The average sieving time for 1kg of maize slurry using the machine was about 2.5 times shorter than in manual sieving. The sieving capacity of the machine was about 2.4 times higher than that of the traditional manual method. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) carried out on the results showed that sieve 1 (mesh size of 1.19 mm) is suitable for maize, millet and sorghum slurries. Sieves 2 and 3, with mesh sizes of 1.00mm and 0.354mm respectively, proved to be significantly better suited for processing of millet slurry.