ABSTRACT The commercial sector of starch extraction has fully automated plants with a minimum scale of 200 ton.day–1, which extracts starch from maize and cassava in Brazil. Although these starches are commodities, the market demands starches with special properties obtained without chemical modifications. A higher-priced starch can compensate for small-scale extraction, as in the case of arrowroot starch, which would correspond to an alternative income for the producer. As a small-scale equipment was not available in Brazil, it was necessary to adapt a hammer mill for arrowroot starch extraction, which should have a performance similar to that obtained from cassava roots using industrial grinders. The degree of disintegration and energy consumption were... |