In oil palm bunch analysis, one of the bunch quality components measured is kernel content. This has been determined by manually cracking oil palm nuts using a hammer. Such a method results in broken kernels, which make separation of the kernels from the broken shells cumbersome and time consuming. In order to overcome the slow and tedious process of cracking oil palm nuts and collecting the kernels from the cracked mixture, a machine was designed, namely, a two-in-one- nutcracker and separator or 2 in 1 CreckSep in short. This machine provides a semi-automatic processing method to speed up cracking of the nuts and collection of the kernels.

Main Research: Dr Maizura Ithnin