Some small coffee producers residing in the municipality of San Jerónimo Coatlán, located in the southern highlands region of Oaxaca, face an obstacle. Despite their skill in cultivating high quality coffee beans, they are limited by the lack of equipment and machinery for processing their raw material, especially for the control part of the roasting process. This lack reduces their capacity to increase the added value of their products and, consequently, their income.
This project from the IEEE UPIITA-IPN Student Branch is designing and developing a coffee roasting machine with automated rotating container and roast selection. This innovation not only seeks to standardize the roasting process, but also allows these passionate producers to offer a variety of roast profiles to satisfy consumer preferences and reach new markets, obtaining truly fair profits. By achieving standardization of key variables, such as container speed and heat manipulation as a function of temperature and humidity, a world of opportunity opens up.
The main objective is to achieve consistency in the roasting process, providing producers with the capacity to offer coffee with specific and distinctive flavor profiles, without losing sight of the complexity and influence of multiple variables in the final quality of the product.
This project was made possible by $1,450.00 in funding from the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS), an EPICS in IEEE partner.