Development of Models for Optimal Selection of Materials for Design of an Oil Palm Fruit Digester using Desirability and Utility Functions
Authors: Otubelu EO, Nwobi-Okoye CC, Oreko BU
DOI Info: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6721086
ABSTRACT
The oil palm fruit digester is the workhorse of small scale oil palm mills scattered throughout Southern Nigeria. Most of these machines are not very reliable due to poor design and material selection. In order to improve the design of these machines, this research is focused on the development of models for optimal selection of materials for digester design using desirability and utility functions. Hence, sixteen possible materials for design of three major components of the digester were selected and ranked using two multi criteria decision making (MCDM) tools namely desirability function (DF) and utility function (UF). The results show that the correlation (R) between the rankings for beater arm materials selection was 0.85, while that for the central shaft and the trough were 0.91 and 0.59. The very high values of R for the beater arm and shaft rankings show that there is a very good agreement between the rankings obtained from the two methods. Furthermore, the not so high R value for the trough rankings shows that though there is some measure of agreement between the two rankings a third MCDM method may be required to validate the two previous rankings.
Affiliations: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Petroleum Resources, Effurun, Delta State, Nigeria.
Keywords: Desirability Function, Utility Function, Oil Palm Fruit Digester, Multi Criteria Decision Making, Material Selection
Published date: 2022/06/30
