Determination of Some Mechanical Properties of Castor Seed (Ricinus communis L.) to Design and Fabricate an Oil Extraction Machine

This study was carried out to determine the effect of seed growing regions and loadingspeed on some mechanical properties of castor seed. these properties are used to designand improve related machines such as expeller that are used for extraction of oil fromcastor seed. mechanical properties of castor seed were expressed in terms of rupture forceand energy, bio-yield force, apparent modulus of elasticity and toughness using materialtesting machine. factorial test with completely randomized design (crd) was used tostudy the effect of velocity (4 levels: 5, 15, 25, 35 mm min-1) and seed growing regions(izeh, dezfoul, baghmalek, shoushtar and urmia). the results showed that the effect ofseed growing region on force, modulus of elasticity, bio-yield force and rupture energywas significant. izeh seed had the maximum rupture force (75.11 n) whereas dezfoul andshoushtar seed had the minimum amount of rupture force (approximately 42 n). also,loading speed had a significant effect on modulus of elasticity and rupture energy. withthe increase of loading speed modulus of elasticity of baghmalek seed decreased significantly from 144 to 65.5 mpa. finally, interaction effect of seed growing region andloading speed was significant for most properties. in this research work, an extrusionsystem was designed and fabricated for the extraction of castor oil.