Design and development of sugarcane bud chipping machine

Mechanical Engineering

In today's world, sugarcane accounts for 80% of sugar produced worldwide. The sugarcane industries just borrow the sugarcane stalks as a whole from the farmers who actually grows it and is further processed in a conventional sugar processing machine without actually separating the planting material it’s known as Bud (which acts as a seed), thus wasting it by crushing it or maybe in some other ways. What we actually intend to do is to solve the above-mentioned problems by creating an Automated machine which will be employed to separate the bud and the furrow part of the sugarcane so that they can be used in future for sugar processing and obtaining the planting material. These bud chips are less bulky, easily transportable and more economical seed material. The left-over cane can be well utilized for preparing juice or sugar or jaggary. In sugarcane inter node cutting operation, sugarcane is cut at its nodal part in small pieces and bud is separated from the sugarcane for seedling purpose. The existing (traditional) tools used for bud cutting of sugar cane are unsafe, messy and need skill and training. The risk of injury is also too high this necessitates the development of a bud cutting machine for sugar cane. The specially designed blades are prototyped using stainless steel Material attached to the hub. Hub is mounted to the shaft which is driven by the worm gear through chain drive. The bud chip technology holds great promise in rapid multiplication of new cane varieties.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.