previous next

De-cor′ti-cator.

A process or a machine for removing the hull from grain. In the hominy-mill the fibrous envelope is taken from the corn, which may be left nearly intact otherwise, if desired. The process is sometimes performed by a preliminary steaming, followed by rubbing or rasping. Decorticating was practiced by the Romans, the whole grain being pounded in mortars with some abradant which rasped off the cuticle or bran. Mills for decorticating are known in England as barley-mills, that grain being principally used as human food in the condition known as pearl barley. The barley-mill has a roughened exterior, and revolves in a wooden casing. The middle portion of the latter is lined with sheetiron pierced like a grater with holes, the sharp edges of which turn upward. In Germany grain is decorticated between stones set at such a distance apart as to rasp the bran off the grain without mashing the latter.

Corn is sometimes decorticated by steeping in lye of wood ashes. The whole hominy thus obtained is then repeatedly washed to extricate the potash.

A Prussian process is a modification of the centrifugal machine, in which the bran is removed by friction of its kernels irrespective of any artificially prepared abrading surfaces. A vertical casing has a number of horizontal annular shelves, arranged concentrically with an internal cylindrical drum. This latter has radial vanes, which sweep in the spaces between the shelves. A portion of the casing is made of sheet-metal, and perforated in such manner that currents of air, induced in the operation of the machine, pass out from the casing and thence into a dust or bran chamber, and carry with them the dust and bran as fast as they are liberated from the grain. The grain being placed upon the shelves, the rotation of the drum causes its vanes to carry the grain around at the rate of about three thousand feet per minute. The time required to wholly remove the useless envelopes from the kernels is very short, only from three to four minutes, and by ventilatingpassages any undue heating is prevented.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
England (United Kingdom) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Mills (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: