Design of Cilembu Sweet Potato Cleaning Machine

Abstract

Sweet potato is a food local product that it is very popular in domestic and foreign consumers. This is because the unique sweetness taste when consumed directly by the consumers. Cilembu Village, in Sumedang is a center of sweet potato production which has been exported to Malaysia, Japan, Korea and Singapore with a production capacity of 10 ton.ha-1. Unfortunateyl, sweet potatoes cleaning process is still low, with about 50 kg.day-1 - 70 kg.day-1 because of it’s manually and conventional processed. In order to increase the cleaning capacity, it was neccesary to do the the research of sweet potato cleaning machine technology . The aim of this study was to design a prototype of sweet potato cleaning machine with a capacity of 100 kg.hr-1. The method conducted in this research was engineering design with observation of research, characteristics with sweet potato, design criteria, functional and structural design, figure design, technical analysis, mechanism process, functional machine and performance test. The measurement results of sweet potato showed that the bulk density, angle of repose, roundness are 562.52 kg.m-3, 70.500, 0.1. The clening machine prototype was produced with dimension of 400 mm (length) x 490 mm (height) x 400 mm (width) with a power source generator using 1 HP electric motor. The resulted of sweet potato cleaning machine functional test showed that actual capacity was 103 kg.hr-1 . In general, the results of engine performance testing can be concluded that the machine can function properly, which can clean sweet potatoes from soil dirt