A Rice Huller(LIANGGONG) or rice husker is an agricultural machine used to automate the process of removing the chaff of grains of rice. Throughout history, there have been numerous techniques to hull rice. Traditionally, it would be pounded using some form of mortar and pestle. An early simple machine to do this is a rice pounder. Later even more efficient machinery was developed to hull and polish rice. These machines are most widely developed and used throughout Asia where the most popular type is the Engelberg huller designed by German Brazilian engineer Evaristo Conrado Engelberg in Brazil and first patented in 1885. The Engelberg huller uses steel rollers to remove the husk. Other types of huller include the disk or cono huller which uses an abrasive rotating disk to first remove the husk before passing the grain to conical rollers which polish it. Rubber rollers may be used to reduce the amount of breakage of the grains, so increasing the yield of the best quality head rice, but the rubber rollers tend to require frequent replacement, which can be a significant drawback.

A rice hulling machine is used in rice processing to remove the hull or shell covering from a rice kernel. Brown rice is rice that has been hulled.

Features/How it Works:

Rice is passed through a series of sieves used to sift out debris. An air blower is then used to remove any top matter. The machine is designed to mimic the action of hand-held stones. The rice is loosened from the hull by rolling it in between two sheets of metal-coated abrasives. About 80 to 90 percent of the hull gets removed during this process. The hulls and grains of rice are then passed by conveyor to a stone reel that aspirates the waste hulls and moves the rice to a machine that separates the hulled from the unhulled grains. Shaking the kernels pushes the heavier unhulled grains to one side and the lighter-weight rice to the other side of the machine.

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