Hammer mill

One of the important bits of processing cereals is milling; whereby the grain is either crushed into flour (dry milling) or into a mushy pulp (wet milling) before being processed further. An example of a laboratory scale hammer mill is shown below.



Picture taken with permission of Dr Wang, Satake Centre for Grain Process Engineering, University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology, UK

What happens is that the machine is closed and locked (you do NOT want your fingers to get caught with the rotating hammers; the mere sound of it spinning tells you to stay a foot away). The grain is then fed through the funnel at the top left centre of the picture; it enters the mill through the hole in the middle of the high velocity hammers. Then it gets smashed into smithereens; almost instantaneously the flour falls out into the sack below (filters, seen at bottom left, can be outfitted to ensure that only flour of a particular size falls through).