Performance evaluation of sugarcane stripper for trash recovery

The limited resources of fossil fuels and increasing price of electricity has resulted severe energy crises in pakistan. being an agricultural country,pakistan has huge potential of biomass that can be used as an alternate source to produce energy. in,pakistan sugarcane trash can be used as one of the available biomass resources for energy production. nearly 5.75 million tons of trash per year is available as a biomass in pakistan. the manual removal of trash is a labor extensive and time consuming process. sugar cane stripper can be used to remove trash from the sugarcane stalks. agricultural mechanization research institute (amri) wing,faisalabad has designed and developed a sugarcane stripper. in this study,the performance evaluation of sugarcane stripper has been carried out for the recovery of sugar cane trash for energy production. the experiments were conducted on three varieties of sugarcane v1 as (col 1148),v2 as (fh-237) and v3 as (mo-240),three sprocket speeds ns1 as (250 rpm),ns2 as (200 rpm)and ns3 as (150 rpm) and three blower speeds nb1 as (750 rpm),nb2 as (1000 rpm),and nb3 as (1500 rpm). the cost comparison of sugarcane stripper has also been carried out in comparison with conventional (manual) method of de-trashing. the result showed that the best combination to get maximum sugarcane stripper efficiency of 79% was using sprocket speed of ns3 (150rpm) and blower speed of nb3 (1500rpm) for all the varieties of sugarcane. the operational cost of sugarcane stripper and conventional method were calculated as rs. 17120/ha and rs. 19200/ha,respectively. © 2015 university of agriculture. all rights reserved.