Design of Garri Frying Machine with User-defined Temperature Regulation and Motion Control System

Abstract

Cassava as a food crop has since secured a prominent space in the food chain of African countries. This important crop has to its advantage various mode of preparation for consumption. One of the most natural preserving states of cassava food is the garri state. Garri is obtained from raw cassava roots through a chain of processes ranging from uprooting, peeling, washing, grating, pressing, sieving to frying. Frying as a part of the processing chain in garri production poses a lot of health hazards to the farmer and environment due to heat and smokes emanating from the process. Existing garri frying machines have temperature and motion control limitations. This research focuses on the design of a garri frying machine with user-defined temperature regulation and motion control system. This is geared towards solving the problem created by lack of automated control of temperature and motion systems in existing garri frying machines. The design was modelled using Proteus simulation environment. Temperature and motion limits were set and maintained with the help of hardware programming through Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The results obtained from the simulation tests showed effective regulation and control of temperature of the heating system and speed of the drive system respectively. The resulting machine will encourage massive investment in cassava value chain to guarantee food security with minimal health risks in garri frying process