DESIGN CONSTRUCTION AND EVALUATION OF AUTOMATED COCOPEAT COMPACTION MACHINE

Mechanical Engineering

ABSTRACT Coconut is one of the major crops grown by small-scale farmers in Kenya coast. This crop has a great potential to contribute to the economy of the region, owing to the wide applications of its products. Virtually all parts of the crop including its leaves, fruit, stem and roots are useful for many products, such as food, beverages, cosmetics, medicine, furniture, textiles and cocopeat. Cocopeat is used as a planting medium in soilless culture in agricultural production and as a soil substitute in containerized crop production. Recently, these soilless media have received much interest in commercial applications in Kenya, especially in horticultural farms. Since the cocopeat is a loose material, its transportation poses a challenge due to its bulkiness. Therefore, a need for compacting it for ease of transportation from the point of production to the point of use.. For this purpose, an automated cocopeat compactor was developed and its performance evaluated. The compactor is a machine that is used to reduce the volume of the cocopeat material through compaction in a confined space. In performance evaluation of the cocopeat machine, dry cocopeat of 2.8% moisture content was compacted at pressures of 2.2 bar to 25 bar and compaction force of 4.5 kN to 50 kN Below 2.2 bar the cocopeat blocks produced disintegrated easily while above 20 bar the blocks produced had irregular edges and easily deformed on handling. For moisture content values below 10%, blocks were obtained at high pressures, while for moisture contents of above 30%, the excess moisture was squeezed out. Well compacted blocks were realized for moisture contents of between 10% and 30%. The cocopeat block machine developed has a blocking capacity of 48 blocks per hour.

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