Senior Design 05-06: Team 3

Grinder:

1) Initially we did some experiments on grinding the cassva by using a food processor because this was something that we had in our kitchen. The food processor worked well for our experiments because we were making small batches and could watch it closely to make sure it was the consistency that we needed. In these experiments we found that it was difficult to achieve the desired consistency on a repeatable basis.

2) In another experiment we decided to use a juicer to grind the cassava. A juicer uses a spinning disk with teeth. The teeth break off small pieces at a time and throw them to the sides. Based on our test we have decided to use the same concept in our grinder design.
To see if we could produce the correct size cassava particles using this idea, we ground some cassava with wood files. We also tested the idea for our spinning disk prototype by putting screws through a piece of wood, then grinding the cassava.

Press:

1) Our first idea for pressing was to use a centrifuge. We did some testing by putting ground cassava in a cup and spinning it to see how much of the juice we could get out. With this experiment we found that we could not spin it fast enough to get the juice out of the cassava.

2) Our second idea was to press the cassava using a hand powered hydraulic. For this experiment we used a garlic and scales to press to determine how much force it took to press the cassava.

 

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