INVESTIGATION AND EVALUATION OF AN EXTRACTING SYSTEM FOR TOMATO SEEDS AND THE REQUIRED ENERGY

Abstract

The core objective of this study was to fabricate a machine to extract tomato seeds and to mitigate the problems of the manual seed extraction such as high labor need and water consumption, unfriendly environment load, and more time consuming. To better fabricate the tomato seed extracting machine, initially some of physical and mechanical properties of the tomato fruits and seeds, related to the mechanical seed extraction, were measured. Then, theoretical calculations were made for the major parts of the fabricated machine to find out the most suitable and safety dimensions of these machine parts. After that, an electric-motor powered machine was fabricated, and subsequently, a techno-economic assessment was performed to investigate the effect of various machine operating parameters on the machine evaluative criteria, as well as to economically compare between the mechanical and manual seed extraction. Following is a summarization for the main points considered during and after the development of this work.