The Design And Expeirment Study Of Husking And Peeling Machine For Lotus Seeds

Lotus seed is a famous tonic food, which has a very high nutritional value. With theimprovement of people’s living standard, the demand of the high-quality white lotus issharply increased. Lotus seed has been planted in China for thousands of years, however,the initial processing of lotus seeds was hard working with consuming large amount oflabor. The traditional lotus seed processing needs a series of processes, including husking,peeling, coring, drying and so on, among them husking and peeling spend about70%ofthe total time. In traditional processing,husking was adopt an arc blade to cut the lotusshell a circle one by one, then squeezing the shell with hand and then separate the shell andthe seed; After husking, peeling was immersing the lotus seeds into the water, thenremoving the skin by rubbing the seed coat. An adult maybe could produce about up to10kilograms of fresh white lotus, so it was hard to realize the large-scale industrializationproduction.As for the disadvantages of traditional manual processing, it needs largeamount of labor and is not health and also easy to cause damage, therefor one after anotherresearchers were done to study the lotus seed processing equipments,and there were evenemerged some husking and peeling machines in present market,but none of them couldwork with high efficiency and less damage.This paper was based on comprehensive researching of the present lotus seedshusking and shelling machines and improved designed a lotus seeds husking and peelingmachine which could process with the husking and peeling together.The research mainlyconsists of the following aspects.1. Study the physical characters of GuangChang white lotus and measured its size.The study show that the lotus seeds length diameter range from18mm to25mm, shortdiameter range from14mm to19mm, and the thickness range from0.6mm to0.9mm. Thedata show that the lotus seed is ellipsoid shaped.2. Mainly improve designed a lotus seeds husking and peeling machine, establishedthe three dimensional figures and engineering drawings, also introduced the workingprinciple and analyzed the structure of the key institutions of the machine.3. Analyzed the motion simulation of the cam part, gained some points’ position andvelocity curve on the push rod, thus obtained the phase angle of each cam.4. Did the husking and peeling experiments on the machine, and verified the huskingand peeling effect of the machine. From the experiments we got the data, when thepressure device adjusted to the medium pressure and pump water pressure adjusted toabout3.0kg/cm2, the machine’s fully processing rate was93.3%, not husking rate was1.35%, not peeling rate was3.21%, the damage rate was2.07%and the processingefficiency was96/min.As for the advantages, the machine was small in size, stable and reliable, also it couldremove the husks efficiently and could be easily repaired. In a word, it could worksmoothly with higher efficiency and less damage.