Shredder for secondary fruit and berry raw materials

It is feasible to process secondary fruit, berry, and vegetable raw materials (squeezes) to maximize the extraction of biologically valuable vitamins, trace elements, dietary fiber and essential amino acids. To shred dry squeezes, use can be made of the same equipment that is suitable for grain milling. The main disadvantages of the existing shedders include their bulkiness, energy consumption and high labor intensity of maintenance. The need to design advanced shredders is due to different characteristics of processed objects and various technological requirements to the initial and finished products. To develop a promising design of a unit for shredding secondary fruit and berry raw materials in the form of dry squeezes, the authors conducted a patent search and analyzed the methods of shredding. Having completed theoretical research, they developed a shredder containing a cylindrical shredding chamber communicating in its upper part with a loading hopper and a discharge cavity of the finished product in its lower part. When testing the developed unit, dry squeezes of cranberries, cranberries, blueberries, black currants, honeysuckle, and sea buckthorn berries with a moisture content of 10% were shredded to obtain powders with a fineness of less than 1 mm. The fineness degree was evaluated on the RL-4 sieve. The experimental study has established high efficiency of the developed unit. The fineness degree of secondary fruit and berry raw materials amounted to 98.3 to 98.8%. The estimated amount of actually consumed energy for shredding berry squeezes with a moisture content of 10% to a fraction of less than 1 mm was 4.40 kWh/t. The next stage of research is the modernization of the shredder to optimize the energy consumption of shredding secondary plant materials of different moisture content and chemical composition with different physical and mechanical characteristics (pulp, seeds, pits, etc.).