Performance Evaluation of Sugarcane Stripper for Trash Recovery

Abstract

The limited resources of fossil fuels and increasing prices of electricity has resulted severe energy crises in Pakistan. Being an agricultural country, Pakistan has huge potential of biomass that can be used as alternate energy source. The shortage of energy has led to search for alternate sources of energies. In, Pakistan sugarcane trashes can be used as a source of biomass for energy production. The manual removal of trash is a labor extensive and time wasting process. In the meanwhile, sugar cane stripper can be used to remove trashes from the sugarcane stalks. A sugarcane stripper was designed and developed by Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute (AMRI) Wing, Faisalabad. In this study, the performance evaluation of sugarcane stripper has been carried out for the recovery of sugar cane trashes for energy production as well as to improve the socio-economic condition of the rural community.  The experiments were conducted on three varieties of sugarcane V₁ (COL1148), V₂ (FH-237), V₃ (MO-240), three sprocket speeds NS₁ (250 rpm), NS₂ (200 rpm), NS₃ (150 rpm) and three blower speeds NB₁ (750 rpm), NB₂ (1000 rpm) NB₃ (1500 rpm). The cost comparison of sugarcane stripper has also been carried out in comparison with conventional method of de-trashing. The result shows 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 varieties of sugarcane. The operation cost of sugarcane stripper and conventional method were calculated as Rs. 17120 and Rs. 19200 respectively.