Vertical roaster for cocoa beans
TECNO 3 has chosen the traditional method of processing whole beans, as it believes it is the best one for good and excellent varieties of cocoa, with special aromas that need to be preserved up to the finished product.
By placing a special focus on cocoa’s bacterial load, which is not completely eliminated with dry roasting alone, TECNO 3 offers its system to remove bacteria from whole beans, installed just before the roasting system. Indeed the bacterial load is distributed on the surface of the shell and the effective treatment eliminates almost all of it.
The TECNO 3 roaster for cocoa beans mod. TFC is made of debacterizing unit, where it is subjected to a batch treatment, and a hot air continuous roaster divided in 3 stages.
In this reactor, cocoa is processed with superheated steam for a relatively short amount of time, enough to eliminate the bacterial load on it.
Once the process has been completed, the cocoa is unloaded into the hopper that continuously dropfeeds the product into the roaster.
The beans move down slowly and go through the 1st stage designed for drying / pre-roasting, where the cocoa is dried and brought to the roasting temperature via the circulation of air heated up by steam batteries, with partial renewal in order to adequately remove humidity. In the next roasting area (2° stage) the beans are processed with hot air, which is recirculated to optimise energy consumption. Finally, the cocoa goes to the cooling area (3° stage), where it is brought to an ambient temperature with the ventilation of highly filtered clean air, to avoid affecting the result of the debacterizing process.
The exhaust air is sent to a cyclone separator, which removes any dust and allows to transfer the air into the surrounding environment with no pollutants. The roasted beans that have been cooled down are collected from the lower part of the system by means of a special rotary valve , discharged in an auger and finally sent directly to the breaking and winnowing system or to an intermediate storage area.
The beans basically lay on this extraction rotary valve, whose special design ensures the cocoa moves down slowly and constantly into each area, and determines the time it takes to go through the various stages, in order to allow to evenly load the screw conveyor.
With a vertical design, TECNO 3’s roaster is very compact and offers good accessibility to make cleaning and maintenance operations easier. The PLC takes care of ensuring an accurate roasting cycle, it adjusts the temperatures and duration of the various stages, which can be set from the touch-screen operator panel.
