Food crops have been an important agricultural commodity since the first crop plant was domesticated by pre-historic man. For thousands of years, man cleaned crops commonly grain crops by winnowing. This is still an important process, but it is no longer adequate to supply the kind of crops needed by farmer.
The main objective of the study was to design and develop a multi-crop cleaner and grader that will automatically clean and grade corn and coffee. Specifically the study aimed to fabricate the machine taking into consideration the material specifications and system components. This also aimed to establish parameters through preliminary testing such as maximum capacity of the machine, operating speed of the machine and also the fan rotational speed. Evaluation of its performance after fabrication according to cleaning and grading rates and cleaning and grading efficiencies were also considered.
This study employed engineering design, planning and analysis. To achieve the objectives of the study, the totality of the design and development of multi- crop cleaner and grader was set into four stages namely; the design stage, fabrication stage, preliminary testing and actual gathering of data.
After the final testing, some of the significant results were obtained. The maximum capacity of the machine is 3750 grams for corn and 2000 grams for coffee. The average cleaning rate of the machine for corn was 33.663249g/s, and for coffee were 15.1890605 g/s. The average grading rate of the machine for corn was 32.5382108g/s, and for coffee were 15.7213817 g/s. The average cleaning efficiency of the machine for corn was 89.8440931%, and for coffee was 76.667%.The average grading efficiency of the machine for corn was 88.8126464%, and for coffee was 89.0474364%.