Design and development of a low cost grain flour blender

Abstract

One of the major solutions to reduce the consumption of wheat flour in the country is to introduce flour mixtures blended with rice flour and other locally produced grain flour to the market and flour based food processors, since it has a great demand even now. Blending equipment are essential to produce flour mixtures with uniformly distributed particles. Flour blending machines are available in the international market, but they are very expensive and those are not at an affordable price to purchase even for medium scale flour producers. Therefore, a low cost grain flour blender was designed and developed to introduce for flour producers. Developed grain flour blender was tested by blending rice flour with wheat flour to the ratio of 3:7 which is generally used for preparing bread. It was found that the minimum blending time required for giving a uniform mixture was 3 minutes when the equipment was operated at 51 rpm. Capacity of the blender was 50 kg per batch and it was operated by a 3 hp electric motor. When the developed flour blender is compared with the available blending machines in the international market with same capacity, it was found that the developed flour blender reduces the blending time and the initial cost of the machine is reduced by 5 times while the flour blending cost is reduced by 25%.