Performance Evaluation of KAU Manure pulverizer

Abstract

Organic manures are good fertilizer to increase soil properties without causing any damage to plant and other related things. By knowing the importance of Jaiva krishi and the need for powdering the dried manures ,Dept. of FPME,KCAET-KAU has developed a ‘KAU Manure Pulverizer’ to pulverize dried organic manures such as cow dung, neem cake, biogas slurry and goat and rabbit faecal pellets, etc . It is now tested to determine its performance and to optimize the machine parameters and material parameters. The capacity of the pulverizer is 500.00 Kg hr -1 . Dried manures were fed into the pulverizing drum from hopper through feed chute and it get pulverized due to the rotation of pulverizing blade. Performance of the pulverizer was evaluated for different dried manures at different moisture contents. Efficient moisture contents obtained for cow dung, goat faecal pellet and neem cake are respectively as 20.93%, 16.70% and 14.20% . Time of operation increases with the increase in moisture content and sieve size except in the case of cow dung. The analysis indicated that maximum efficiency of 98.5% was obtained for the goat faecal pellets at 1.5 clearance and at 5 mm sieve size. With 10 mm sieve size maximum efficiency of 99% was obtained for goat faecal pellets. The least efficiency was observed for both cow dung and neem cake. The complete testing and analysis indicated that KAU manure pulverizer with 5 mm sieve with 15 mm clearance was performed efficiently for all types of dried manures.