Design and construction of a simple hand operated sugarcane crusher.

Abstract

Uganda's economy primarily depends on agriculture with about 80-90% of the population employed in farming accounting to 22% of the. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Sugarcane. is one of the major commercial crops grown and processed in Uganda for both local consumption and export. Processing sugarcane is beneficial to the society and the country at large due to its many products which include sugar, alcohol, residues called bagasse is used as an animal feed a raw material for paper industries’, as agricultural mulch among others. There are large. numbers of low income sugar cane farmers in Uganda who grow small acreages of sugar cane for. subsistence use and for sale to. earn family income but find it challenging to use electrical equipment which is expensive to purchase and maintain and thus not practical for the scale of production. These farmers fry to utilize machines that. use diesel engines which in turn prove to be expensive due to the cost of diesel. Further the existing manual crushers are relatively expensive, lot of operate, and produce relatively poor quality juice. The low income sugarcane farmers of Uganda therefore need a low cost and affordable manual sugarcane crusher that can produce high quality juice without need for electricity and skills so as to improve incomes of the farmers and enhance livelihood of the farmers' families. The objective of this project is therefore to design, fabricate and test for the efficiency of hand operated sugarcane crusher The design of various components took place through careful analysis of the. forces acting on the them as this enabled in proper selection of the force resistant materials plain carbon and mild steel materials plus Aluminium were the major ones used in the fabrication of the prototype due to their suitability for the project and availability. Engineering drawings produced were used in the fabrication of the different components of the machine after which assembly was. carried out through welding and use of bolts and nuts. The prototype was tested for its efficiency and capacity and the results indicated- an overall efficiency of 65% and a capacity of 73kg/hr. The costing of the machine was 593,000 'Uganda shillings.