Desenvolvimento de concepção de mecanismo para a retirada da casca de mandioca

Abstract

The cassava crop (Manihot esculenta Crantz) represents a considerable part of food production in the world. For its consumption in natura, baked or fried, it is necessary to remove its thick skin. There are some manual methods to do it however; they can offer physical risks of the type or cuts and mutilations of who performs that function. In this context, the construction of a machine for peeling cassava adds greater value to the product, which may be sold processed and it has the potential of offering significant risk reduction of manual peeling of cassava. Therefore, this work, set in the area of agricultural machinery design, presents the conceptual design phase of a mechanism to perform the function of peeling cassava. As a result, it is shown a brief overview of previous works, the functional structure of the technical system, the creative development of solution principles and the digital modeling of the proposed concepts in CAD/CAE (virtual prototype). Moreover, it includes the construction of prototypes according to the defined concepts and their performing functional tests. This evaluation allowed us to define the most appropriate approach to proceed to the next stages of machine design. At the end, we present the concept of a mechanism that performs the function of peeling cassava, which uses a system that cuts longitudinal segments of the thick skin of cassava limiting the depth. Thus, preparing the surface of the product to highlight the shell by means of self-adjusting actuators peeling surface, between the hard shell and cassava pulp.