AN IMPROVED DESIGN OF A SOYBEAN PEEL SEPARATOR FOR TEMPE PRODUCTION

Abstract

Tempe is a typical food of Indonesia which is consumed by people throughout the world. Tempe is made of fermented soybean by Rhizopus sp. The production of tempe is labor intensive. Among the twelve core stages in tempe production. One of that is separating the peel of soybean which is performed by human energy. It is hard to make contamination-free tempe since manual operation is involved in the process. This research was conducted by reverse engineering method with the aim to redesign an existing soybean peeling separator base on the user needs. The cycle time of whole tempe production to detect the problem were calculated. The longest time is peel separating process which use 40% from the whole tempe production. This station will be examined deeply an calculated per work elements and classify these elements to be the criterion of the developed machine. These criterion generate various design concepts, then each design will be chosen using scoring concept, screening concept, and feasibility to be realized. The results revealed that, the newly designed peel separator decreased the processing time by 39%, which decrease the risk of contamination by manual operator. In addition to that, the reduction of cycle time was decreased the water and electricity use of tempe production.