Manufacturing and Evaluating a Small Scale Thermal Unit for Controlling Insect Infested Stored Wheat

The main objective of the present study is to investigate a thermally disinfesting stored wheat . To fulfill the objective of this research work, a small scale unit was designed and manufactured from local material taking into consideration its effectiveness. Preliminary experiments and calibration were conducted to determine the suitable time at the appropriate heating temperature degree. The performance of the manufactured unit was studied as a function of change in the amount of wheat grain (1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 kg) and heating temperature (50, 60 and 70 C°) and evaluated in terms of equipment productivity, germination ratio, mass loss, equipment efficiency, specific energy requirements and production cost. Experimental results revealed that the optimum machine performance is obtained at grains amount of 2 kg and heating temperature 50 C° , which gives 13.3 kg/h equipment productivity, 96% germination ratio, 9% weight loss and 91% equipment efficiency with minimum energy requirements of 0.11 kW.h/kg and production cost of 1.12 LE/kg