• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.163-168
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• 2010

With income growth and "well-being" trends, sales of corn has been increased recently. Corns are processed at processing facilities on the main production site. Corn processing steps include removing bract, steaming, vacuum packing, and storing. To replace manual corn bract removing, some bract removing machines were imported and used. However, the machines were abandoned shortly, because of high damaging ratio of corns. In this research, factors of successful bract removing was studied with rotating rollers and air-injection nozzles to develop corn bract removing system. The test device was composed of a cylindrical roller, an air spray nozzle, a regulator, and a motor. Designing factors were roller type, diameter of air spraying nozzle, spraying angle, and spraying pressure. The measured factors were bract removing rate and damaging rate. It was found that optimum cylindrical roller surface shape was cylindrical roller and linear grove roller. This roller shape produced lowest damaging rate. Test results of the efficacy of preprocessing showed that the air spraying after preprocessing produced highest performance. The rotational speed and inclination of the roller didn't affect the bract removing performance. Optimum injection angle of the air jet nozzle was $70^{\circ}$. To increase bract removing rate and to reduce corn damage, required injection pressure and injection nozzle diameter were decided to less than 0.4 MPa and 2.5 mm, respectively. More than 3 times of nozzle passing produced good bract removing performance and there were no significant difference between the number of passing times.