MOISTURE CONDITIONING OF BULK RAPESEEDS AND DETERMINATION OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES AND PERCENTAGE OIL YIELD UNDER UNIAXIAL COMPRESSION LOADING

This study described the mechanical properties and estimation of the percentage oil yield of bulk rapeseeds samples at different moisture content under compression loading. The initial moisture content was determined to be 4.879 w.b. The moisture content levels of 6.615, 7.144, 8.325 and 9.375 w.b. were determined using the moisture conditioning oven at different relative humidity levels from 60 to 75 with 5 interval. The mass of the samples was kept constant at 111.69 g repressing an initial pressing height of 60 mm using the vessel diameter of 60 mm. The samples were compressed at a the maximum force of 100 kN and a speed of 5 mm/min. The observed parameters were deformation, oil yield, oil expression efficiency, hardness and deformation energy. Based on the correlation analysis, it was found that all the observed parameters negatively correlated significantly (P < 0.05) with moisture content. The correlation values were between -0.933 and -0.983. The model parameter estimates were also described from the simple linear regression analysis. The moisture content of 4.875 w.b. was established to be optimum for a higher oil yield of 14.849 ± 2.475 , oil expression efficiency of 46.593 ± 7.767 , deformation energy of 447.375 ± 22.710 J, deformation of 30.7 ± 0.410 mm and hardness of 3257.62 ± 43.519 N/mm. © 2022 TAE 2022 - Proceeding of the 8th International Conference on Trends in Agricultural Engineering 2022. All rights reserved.