Cassava starch making process for processing cassava into starch

Cassava starch is one of the main products of cassava processing. Compared to garri and flour, it can be used in industrial applications, alcohol, textile industry, etc. And it has broad market in China, Southeast Asia, Nigeria, European and other countries. Therefore more and more people want to do cassava starch business and want to know modern cassava starch making process.

Cassava starch making process

The cassava starch making process can be divided into 5 major parts

Cleaning & washing - crushing - screening - dewatering & drying – sieving and packaging

Cassava cleaning & washing

Harvested cassava surface has a lot of impurities. The first thing we need to do is to remove impurities such as dirt, sand from the surface of cassava. This step in cassava starch making process is mainly to to ensure the cleanliness of cassava and prevent impurities from entering the later stage and affecting the quality of starch.

Machines for cleaning and washing

Cassava crushing

Then we need to crush the cassava, destroy the cassava structure and release starch from cassava. This is the most important step in cassava starch making process for the crushing rate of cassava determines the yield of cassava starch.

Due to cassava has big size, we normally adopts a cutting machine to cut cassava into small pieces of 3-4 mm, which can reduce the working pressure of the cassava crusher and meanwhile make the cassava crushed more thoroughly. Then we use a rasper to crush cassava tubers into a slurry. At present, rasper is the most efficient cassava grater whose crushing rate is as high as 94% or more.

Cassava cutter & rasper

Cassava slurry screening

The screening part is also the core part in cassava starch making process. It can be divided into two parts, screening of insoluble impurities and screening of soluble impurities.

Insoluble impurities mainly include fibers and sand. Firstly using centrifugal sieve to remove large fibrous particles and then adopting fine fiber sieve for removing small fibers. The sand impurities not only influence the quality of cassava starch, it also affects the taste of starch. Therefore a desander is necessary for sand removing.

Screening of insoluble impurities

Soluble impurities include fats and proteins. Hydrocyclone system is mainly used for this purpose in cassava starch making process, it has the function of concentration, purification and recycline.

After the removal of insoluble and soluble impurities, we can obtain the pure starch milk.

Machines for starch refining, dewatering & drying

Cassava starch dewatering & drying

The water moisture in starch milk is too high to be dried directly. Therefore we use a dewatering machine to reduce the moisture content of starch milk to about 38% - a moisture content suitable for drying. After that, we use the flash drying system to dry starch to water content to about 14%.

Sieving machine & Starch packaging machine

Cassava starch sieving and packaging

To ensure the fineness of starch, sieving machine is used in cassava starch making process to achieve the purpose of removing large starch granules. Normally multi-stage sieving is adopted to fully guarantee the quality of starch. And then we adopt the automatic packaging machine to pack cassava starch into bags for sale.