MANUALLY OPERATED LOW COST GROUNDNUT DECORTICATOR ABSTRACT
In some parts of our country, peanuts are a major crops. Most peanut farmers shell their peanuts by hand, an inefficient and labor-intensive process. Our goal is to build a low-cost, easy to manufacture peanut Sheller targeted at individuals and farmers that will increase the productivity of the peanut farmers. Furthermore, this peanut decorticator can be manufactured with materials that are locally available in the target communities.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND
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Our aim is to fabricate the decorticator for areas where peanuts are grown, processed, and marketed. We hope to increase peanut sector productivity and raise the technological bar by creating a simple, low-cost peanut decorticator for use by households and small cooperatives.
The target users include individual households, women's cooperatives, and subsistence farmers. This presents a huge group of communities that could be served.
Like much of the work that is done in the agricultural sector in the country, women and children generally do the peanut shelling manually. Our machine and such like innovation in this process could significantly reduce the time require for shelling, as well as spur technological growth by introducing simple, novel intermediate technologies.

1.2. STATEMENTS OF THE PROBLEM

There is large production capacity of groundnut in most areas of Ethiopia. But still there is no enough appropriate shelling or decorticating machine production in Ethiopia. For this reason the peanut sector productivity is not sufficient. Also its operation for shelling is done by females and children manually. This takes their time that might have been utilized for other activities.

These wide problems are initiating us to solve the issue by designing manually operated low cost groundnut decorticator and thereby increasing productivity of groundnut in the country.

1.3. OBJECTIVES

1.3.1 GENERAL OBJECTIVES

To design, fabricate and test the performance of manually operated low cost peanut decorticating machine.

1.3.2. SPECFIC OBJECTIVES
1. To design the major components such as, decorticator drum ,adjustable concave, turning handle, casing including inlet hopper and outlet.
2. To test and evaluate the performance of decorticator in terms of shelling efficiency and percent kernel damage

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

In the developed countries, hand powered or electric powered machines perform peanut shelling or decorticatingcommercially. Pearman Corporation (Chula, GA) is one manufacturer of such machines.
Their machines shell peanuts by striking them with rods until the shells split open. Theshelled kernels then fall through a grating where they are collected. Their hand poweredmachine can process 68 kg of peanuts per hour and costs $275. The electric poweredversion can handle 250 kg/hr and costs $1250.

The Thai Rubber-Tyre Peanut Sheller uses a rubber tire to rub peanuts against ametal housing. It was presented at the Post Harvest Technology Conference Nov 19-20,
1981. Bangkok 21p. It is assembled using a full sized automobile tire, and many formedsheet metal components. See: www.idrc.ca/library/document/060359/chap5_e.html#chap5.1 and www.idrc.ca/library/document/060359/.The cost of such a hand-cranked machine is $130. It can process peanuts at roughly60kg/hour. Other technologies from the same workshop include a wooden paddle Sheller (70kg/hr) and a revolving stone Sheller (70kg/hr).

The Malian Peanut Sheller is an example of a low cost, small scale decorticator. Itsdesign is available for free. The materials needed for this decorticator design cost less than $10.It is constructed out of two pieces of molded concrete, and a few basic pieces of metal usedto reinforce the concrete reinforcements and to make the axle and crank mechanisms. TheMalian Peanut Sheller can process 50kg/hr (www.peanutsheller.org).

3. MATERIALS AND METHDOLOGY

3.1.MATERIALS

As described above