Design and evaluation of a concave blade to minimize damage to cocoa beans using a rotary roller system using ANSYS Static Structural and Explicit Dinamic

Sanchez J.A.; Fernandez J.F.H.; Vilcarromero J.F. · International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering, ICECCME 2025 (2025) · DOI: 10.1109/iceccme64568.2025.11277538

Resumen

In Perú, the manual process of cracking the cocoa pod is carried out with machetes or wooden mallets. This causes significant damage to the beans. Therefore, this study aimed to design, simulate and implement a cocoa pod cracking machine with counter-rotating rollers and concave blades at an appropriate inclination angle, in order to reduce mechanical damage and improve the efficiency of bean extraction. To achieve this goal, structural and dynamic simulations were performed at ANSYS to evaluate the behavior of the blades at different angles. The angle that performed best was 60° because it produced the lowest maximum stress, reaching a safety factor of 4.2 in the dynamic simulation. Subsequently, experiments were carried out varying the size of the cocoa pod, the speed of the roller and the storage time. From these experiments, an average bean damage of 0.577% and an extraction efficiency of more than 96% was achieved. In addition, the overall test processed 192.2 kg of cobs, resulting in minimal grain damage of 0.333% and extraction efficiency of 96.71%. Therefore, our design proved to be efficient, low-impact, scalable, and suitable for industrial applications, with potential future improvements focused on fruit size sorting for further optimization

Instituciones: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas