Design and Development of an Integrated Rice Milling Plant

Abstract

Most Nigerians prefer imported rice to the locally produced ones which contains a lot of pieces of stones. The presence of pieces of stone in the locally produced rice is due to poor handling. The parboiled rice is sun-dried by spreading on top of mat on the ground, and pieces of stone find their way ito the rice. In attempt to improve the quality of rice through better processing technique, this paper focuses on design and construction of an integrated rice milling plant. This system has a drying unit which works on fluidized bed drying technology. The dried rice is passed into the miller for dehulling in a sequential manner. The parameters of fluidized bed were calculated to establish minimum fluidizing velocity, bed height and pressure drop. The various forces at play in the rice milling during the process of milling have been analyzed and calculated. The parboiled rice had moisture content of 32% and after ffluidized bed drying, the moisture content dropped to 18%. The rice was milled in the miller and during the process parameters like milling rate, total mill recovery and coefficient of husking were determined and presented in the text.