Assessment of Dry and Wet Milling using Fabricated Burr Mill

Abstract

Size reduction processes are utilized to produce watery paste vegetables common in most developing countries. The research was executed in two parts; the first part was a survey of workers and owners of pepper grinding machine in 3 markets Nigeria, to obtain information on experience working with the machine and functionality of burr mills using Structured questionnaire .The second part involved physical measurement of the dimensions, and other engineering parameters on five randomly selected pepper grinding machines from a lot in each market, About 25.4% of the respondents has being working with burr mill for 11-15 years, 23.7% has 16-20 years’ experience while 10% of the respondents have spent above 20 years in business while 93.22% of the respondents use the machine more than three times daily. In view of this it could be deduced that the interaction of the working parts of the machine is un-ending in the sense that increase in the numbers of usage of the burr mill increases the level of wear of the working parts. The physical measurement of the component parts of the burr mill of existing machine compared to that of new machine showed that the level of wear and tear of the machines varies which is due to age of machine and frequency of usage.

Keywords: burr-mill, grinder, dry milling, wet milling.