Coffee roasting and flavoring equipment developed by the Department of Mechanical Equipment Manufacturing, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, not only meets domestic demand but is also exported to several countries, generating significant revenue.
Nguyen Thanh Xuan, owner of a coffee processing facility in Loc Phat Ward, Bao Loc Town, Lam Dong Province, said: “Since buying this equipment, we no longer worry about coffee beans getting burned during roasting. Now we simply set the temperature, and after about 20 minutes we have a perfectly roasted batch.”
“Decoding” Foreign Technology
In early 2001, Trung Nguyen Coffee Company commissioned scientists at the university’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering to design a closed-system coffee roaster that would use less fuel, avoid environmental pollution, and be easy to operate.
After nearly a year of research, the team led by Dr. Tran Doan Son produced an oil-fired coffee roasting and flavoring machine. However, the high roasting temperatures caused the metal components to expand, increasing friction and making the drum difficult to rotate, which generated noise.
Trung Nguyen later imported a 120 kg-per-batch coffee roaster from the German company Probat so the researchers could study it and build their own. After nearly a year of “decoding” the machine, Dr. Son and his colleagues successfully built a similar roaster, making improvements to suit the characteristics of Vietnamese coffee beans—such as differences in size and moisture content.
The new equipment can be operated in automatic or semi-automatic mode. Once the desired temperature (230–240 °C) is set, the coffee roasts evenly and the machine shuts off automatically. If the beans are fully roasted but the color is not yet ideal, the roasting time can be extended. Because the roasting drum rotates evenly, the beans neither burn nor roast unevenly. Each batch takes about 20 minutes, and gas consumption is no higher than that of the imported machine.
Remarkably Cost-Effective
According to the research team, the equipment is made with 90% locally sourced components. Nguyen Xuan Thien, Head of Equipment Engineering at Trung Nguyen Coffee (Dak Lak), which operates 20 of these machines, said the cost is only about one-tenth that of comparable foreign-made products.
The design developed by Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology has since been transferred to Son Viet Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in District 9, Ho Chi Minh City, for mass production.
Engineer Pham Nhu Thanh, Director of Son Viet, reported that the company has already installed more than 60 of these machines for domestic customers and has exported units to Russia, Indonesia, and Cambodia.