The Design of Experiment Application (DOE) in the Beneficiation of Cashew Chestnut in Northeastern Brazil

Abstract

Brazil is one of the world´s leaders in the production and processing of cashew chestnut and 100% of these cashew chestnut processing industries are located in the northeastern region of the country. For the maintenance and enlargement of the cashew chestnut market it is necessary to have a guarantee of the product quality by means of controlling the productive process. In this case, the application of DOE (Design of Experiments) is suggested in the beneficiation process of the cashew chestnut, notably in the stage of decortication, where the chestnuts are being cut in bands, by a mechanical means. For this process, a fractionated factorial experiment planning was used and evaluated response variable in the experiment was the quality of the almond in the final stage of production, measured by the percentage of whole almonds after the separation from the barks. The chosen process factors were the almonds size, the humidification of the environment, the temperature of the environment before the decorticator and the velocity of the decorticator. At the end of the experiment, it was observed that DOE showed to be an applicable tool that indicates which factors showed to be more influential, as well as, their levels of adjustment. It was observed that the variables related to the size of the almonds, the velocity in decortication are the influential factors of production in this process, apart from a strong noise being identified in this process, observed by the strong variance in the experiment data, especially that of the response variable.