Molienda de zanahoria: una estrategia para producir alimentos con valor agregado.

Abstract

Milling is a unit operation widely used in the food industry to turn grains, vegetables and meats into small-sized products. In this context. In this sense, a small-scale hammer mill was designed and built in order to reduce the size of dehydrated carrots and thus obtain a value-added food. Mill parameters such as force, torque and power were determined by theoretical calculations, while operational parameters such as milling coefficient and performance were determined by the carrot milling and sieving process. The force required by the equipment to mill the carrot was 5820 kg*m/s2, whereas the torque and power required by the motor to generate the cuts through the hammers were 34.92 kg*m2/s2 and 989.28 kg*m2/s3, respectively. A performance of 90 % and a milling coefficient of 10 allowed to reduce the diameter of the carrot from 5 cm to 0.5 cm. These results show that the equipment designed and built in this work allows to reduce the size of dehydrated carrot, a process that gives added value to the food and could be consumed as a natural snack.