STUDY OF THE COMPRESSION BEHAVIOR OF SUNFLOWER SEEDS USING THE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

It is known that the phenomena that occur during compression of sunflower seedsare very complex. Comprehension of these phenomena is important for increasingthe performance of the equipment in the vegetable oil industry, both for thecracking of shells and for the grinding of kernels. Also for the pressing of oilseedmaterials it is helpful to understand the compression behavior of sunflower seeds.The major objective of this work is to find an easy way of highlighting how thestresses and deformations propagate in sunflower seeds kernels and shells duringthe compression process, with the aim of optimizing the energy consumptionrequired for the mechanical processing. Therefore, now days there is and we canuse the finite element method. This method is the most advanced engineering toolfor computing numerical and mathematical modeling of complex phenomenainvolving the propagation of stress and strain fields in continuous media. In thispaper a two-dimensional FEM model for analyzing sunflower seeds subjected atcompression by axial and lateral directions is presented. For experimentalvalidation of FEM model we made uniaxial compression tests on sunflower seeds,using a Hounsfield/Tinius Olsen unit for mechanical tests, H1KS model. Themodels used in this work highlight that the orientation of the seeds is veryimportant. There are situations when it is desirable that the stresses to be higher (atshelling, grinding, pressing, etc.) or situations when it is desirable that the stressesto be smaller (at transport, storage, etc.).