Design and Testing of Rubber Seed Crusher

Abstract

Rubber seeds are one of the products from rubber plantations which are in large numbers but have not been utilized. The flesh of the seeds contains vegetable oil of 45.63% of rubber seeds and can be used as raw material for edible oil. The hard shell of rubber seeds can also be used, one of them being biobriquettes.This study aims to separate the rubber seed flesh from the shell with a mechanically designed crusher and separator of the rubber seed flesh from the rubber seed shell. This machine is designed and made using a single roller crusher as a rubber seed crusher and at the output there is a static sieve to separate the rubber seed shell and rubber seed flesh. The dimensions of this machine are 1310 mm × 500 mm × 600 mm. The results showed the effective capacity of 46.998%, with the percentage of seeds left behind by 17%. The yield of rubber seed flesh is 31.17%, the yield of rubber seed shell is 67% with losses of 1.84%. The power consumption, break event point and internal rate of return (IRR) of this machine are 7.43 kWh, 1.247,58 kg/year and 55.63%, respectively. The use of this machine is considered feasible due to its NPV > 0.