Performance Evaluation of African Breadfruit (Treculia Africana) Seed Dehuller

Abstract

This paper reports the effect of the parboiling time on dehulled kernel out-turns (DKO) of African breadfruit seeds, and the most recent effort to upgrade an existing dehuller and its performance. Two common and readily available varieties – Treculia var. africana and var. inverse were used in the study. The seeds were parboiled for 0 (control), 2, 5, 8, 11 and 14 minutes and then dehulled. The result revealed that the parboiling time had a significant effect on the DKO of the two varieties of the seed. The DKO increased from 0 to 5 min of the treatment, after which it decreased considerably up to 14 min of the parboiling time. The obtained data were used to develop a non-linear quadratic regression model to predict the DKO as a function of the parboiling time. The performance evaluation of the breadfruit seeds dehuller revealed that it was significantly influenced by the variety.