Sustainable Development Goal: An Engineering Approach to Health and Well-Being Implication of Wet Milling

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are targets for global development adopted in September 2015, set to be achieved by 2030. All countries of the world have agreed to work toward achieving these goals. The health and well-being indicators that are needed to achieve the agenda goals are based on reliable and relevant quantitative data, which are currently rare or even nonexistent in some parts of the world. Therefore, it is now necessary to initiate a more integrative public health and research strategy in order to collect new data, particularly those relating to current wet milling process of food resulting in emerging diseases that affect the public, especially in developing countries. Observation has shown that the disc plate of the attrition mills is regularly taken for regrinding to obtain an optimum required size of the milled food products. It means that the disc plate has a very high rate of wear of the grooves or flutes engraved on it during casting. The fillings that wear out are deposited either in the milled food processed or are washed out after the milling which have adverse effects on the consumption of the food materials. To determine the effects of speed of grinding machine and different types of grinding plates for wet milling of some selected crops, an assessment and evaluation of the extent of wear elements due to the wear rate of the attrition type mill plate on wet milling were conducted. Wear elements with adverse health effects in human metabolism are suspected to be present during wet milling and required to be detected and compared with World Health Organization (WHO) standards in order to achieve one of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), health and well-being. Wear elements rate was studied by conducting the parametric studies (experimentally and computationally) using atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS). Studies were performed with three different crops (beans, millet, and tomatoes) as C1, C2, and C3; three different corn-grinding models (GX 160, GX 200, and GX 390) as G1, G2, and G3; and four different grinding plates (Adex, Nas, Lotus-Zamfara, and Lotus-India) as P1, P2, P3, and P4 to understand the effect of corn-grinding plate speed (rotational) and wearability of different corn-grinding plates on the depositional level of wear elements on the ground crops during wet corn-milling. When wear occurs by this mechanism, the chemical composition of the metal is a dominating factor. The depositional level of the resulting progeny of particles were analyzed by AAS analysis techniques prior to and after milling. Relationship type of corn-grinding mill and corn-grinding plates was established using multiple regression analysis. The results showed that about 98% of the wear elements variance is explained by the corn-grinding plates and corn-grinding mill (92%), respectively. The type of corn-grinding mills was a major predictor of depositional level of wear elements, and hence the change in the horse power rating of corn-grinding mill predicts the depositional level of the wear elements during the wet corn-milling of crops. Higher depositional level was observed at higher speeds of corn-grinding model GX 390 and corn-grinding plate Lotus-Zamfara which is having negative result to attaining the SDG.