Establishment of a Cereal Processing Plant to Obtain Flour in Cameroon

The work presented in this paper is to set up a cereal processing plant to obtain flour, using cereals like maize, corn, sorghum and soya bean in Cameroon. The study aims to determine the steps to design a plant that can operate in a sustainable way from its commissioning with the objective of a maximum production capacity of 6 t/h. The procedure to achieve this objective is through the use of the V. CAUDILL method which gives the steps for the development of a new processing plant. The functional analysis for the design and sizing of the equipment for the processing chain, the Pareto diagram in order to make the best choice of equipment suppliers. The determination of the characteristics of the machines from suppliers allowed us to calculate the supply power of 315 kVA and then to choose the appropriate transformer of 630 kVA, followed by the calculation of the minimum surface area of approximately 3259 m2 of implantation of the processing plant. An application has also been set to help economic developers make decisions on the different combinations of cereals, to produce according to the desired profitability. The software gives sorghum as the most profitable cereal in the case of milling each grain in isolation. On the other hand, the comparative study of the different possible combinations of cereals by the software shows that the most profitable is the combination of the four cereals and that in making the combination of three cereals the most profitable is the sorghum, maize and soya combination.