Thoughts on the Design of a Servo Electro-Hydraulic African Pestle

This paper introduces the automation of the African pestle using an electrohydraulic servo system. The purpose of this actuator is to pound food such as cassava in the traditional African way. First, we describe the physical pestle model using a hydraulic cylinder. Secondly, we develop a nonlinear mathematical model that describes the dynamics of the device. Next, we design a PID controller to track an appropriate reference signal. Numerical simulations executed with Matlab /Simulink show satisfactory results. At the end of this preliminary study, we plan to improve the performance of this machine to create and market it.