Design And Development Of Date Seed Oil Extraction Machine: Okpala, Tochukwu C

ABSTRACT

 This work, design and development of date seed oil extraction machine was aimed to produce more date seed oil which will be better than other means of date seed oil extraction. The machine is powered by a 3hp of electric motor. The machine components are; the electric motor, extraction unit, belt, driving and driven pulleys, electric heater, speed reducer and hopper. A heater was used to pre-heat the date seed before extraction. The seed was heated for 15mins which resulted to the production of 95g quantity of oil with improved quality. When heated for 3mins the quantity produced was 50.5g which contain impurities. the throughput (TP) of the machine was determined as l 90g/hr. The performance evaluation test indicates that the optimal heating is l 5minutes, the efficiency of the developed machine was determined as 79.17%. The machine is cheap and has high oil extraction yield and could easily fit into medium and large scale industry for the production of date palm oil.