Background:
Banana Pseudo-stem is a good source for vermin-composting, especially in the bananagrowing area. Size reduction of wet pseudo-stem of high moisture content is a challenging task and is still a manual operation in many banana compost industries in India. Production of the desired size of the compost pile is a crucial task that is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and tedious. Therefore, a power-operated continuous type machine was specially designed, fabricated, and tested for size reduction of banana pseudo-stem by ICAR-CIAE, Regional Centre, Coimbatore in collaboration with ICAR-National Research Centre for Banana, Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu:
Technology Details:
The machine is a horizontal free-standing unit mounted on four legs. It is operated by 3-hp three-phase motor. It consists of a feeding chute, a pair of rotors with blades made of EN 8 material, and an outlet. By adopting the optimum diameter of the rotors and the specific geometry of the shredder blades, the rotors were able to pull in the pseudo-stem independently, sheared by the cutting blades on the feeding rollers, and shredded to the required size. The machine capacity is on an average 6000 kg/h by engaging two labourers, while labour can chip about 60 kg/h manually. This machine is gender-friendly, cost-effective as compared to the manual method, portable, and suitable for the on-farm task with unskilled workers besides reducing drudgery involved in the traditional method. The approximate unit cost of the machine is Rs. 60000. Aggregate analysis, degree of shredding, and other physical parameters of the machine-made cut-pieces are at the recommended level as well as on a par with the manually-made pieces. A high proportion (85.3%) of the desirable level of 25-50 mm final fragments was achieved with machine compared to the manual method (78.4%), this resulted in improved quality of ingredients for compost production.