Chapter 6 "Selection of idea"

Hello Lovely Readers,

In today's session we will be taking you through how the team selected the best idea out of the many

After sessions of brainstorming, we finally narrowed our ideas into three subsystems which are the Power subsystem, the Shelling subsystem and the Separating subsystem. For each of these, we aimed to find what alterations we would best make to the existing model to ensure that it meant the needs of the user and our community partner.

We then narrowed down our ideas to five approaches. These were (1) to install a heating/ drying compartment that would remove moisture from the groundnuts before the shelling could commence or (2) to incorporate a motor-driven vibrating platform to reduce moisture and loosen shells to our current design. Similarly, (3) we also considered incorporating a mechanism that would separate the groundnuts from the shells automatically after the shelling process. Likewise, (4) the fourth approach proposes padding the interior of the sheller and determining the amount of pressure and force that would preserve the quality of the groundnuts. (5)The last of the approaches considered the instalment of a sieving platform that would separate quality groundnuts based on weight.

Thus, we first undertook some concept evaluation and analysis whereby we considered the different ideas based on the criteria of cost, amount of labour required for the process, and the amount of time shelling would take which are all priorities stated by our user.

We came by with the following graphs:

From these, we came up with a mini-hypothesis that we would use a pedal driven lever to control the applied force, while the sheller would have an inlet for inserting groundnuts and the shelling blade would be made light and blunt to prevent destroying the kernels. The shelled groundnuts would be separated using a motor-powered sieving bed.