Abstract
Manual extraction of tomato seed is a tedious operation and has some drawbacks such as incentive labor, excessive water use and much time consuming. Therefore, this study was dedicated to address the problems of manual extraction via manufacturing a simple machine to extract tomato seeds. Some of physical and mechanical properties of tomato fruits and seeds were measured. After that, an electric-motor powered machine was fabricated and followed by a techno-economic to investigate the potential effects of the machine operating parameters, namely, separating drum speed, feeding rate and drum with holes diameter on the machine evaluative criteria, namely, extractor productivity, extractor efficiency, seed purity, seed losses percentage and specific energy consumption. The analysis of data showed running the machine at the drum speed of 15.71 m/s (600 rpm), feeding the machine with 150 kg/h of tomato fruits and selecting the drum with holes diameter of 5 mm attained the following results to operate the developed machine economically: extractor productivity (9.12 kg/h), extractor efficiency (96.80%), seed purity (92%), seed losses percentage (3.20%) and specific energy requirement (0.042 kW.h/kg). Germination tests proved that the mechanical extraction of seeds did not harm the germinabilty of seeds as compared to the manual method. Lastly, the cost of manual process rose by about 42 and 182 % in comparison with the cost of mechanical system before and after discounting pulp tomato revenue, respectively.
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