Abstract

Significant variations in the economic importance of groundnuts for domestic and industrial purposes exist.Groundnuts are energy demanding and time consuming, an effective machine for the separation is developed. The machine employs a fibre sub-component in the peeler engine which is responsible for the peeling. The machine basically comprises of hopper, peeling chamber with sub-component (fibre), sifter (separator), 220 Volt AC motor, and a chaff container respectively. The machine is powered by the 220 AC motor with 1 HP providing a revolution of 120 rpm and manually controlled in the absent of power providing a revolution of 90 rpm. The materials used in the fabrication of the machine were sourced locally so as to ensure that the machine is cheap, affordable, and easily maintain by peasant farmers. Performance investigation carried out shows a good performance of the machine with a peeling efficiency, unpeeled efficiency, machine damage efficiency, cleaning efficiency and output capacity of 90%, 6.5%, 8%, 90% and 80kg/hour respectively, for groundnut seeds with 86.5% dryness. The result of the study also shows that the machine will be more suitable in today’s groundnut farming with and without the presence of power to reduce stress, waste of resources, and increasing productivity.