- Design And Development of Diesel Engine Driven Mechanical Sugarcane Harvester

Abstract

Sugar production in Ethiopia started in 1954/55 when the Wonji Sugar Factory was commissioned and produced 15,843 tons of white sugar in the first campaign. Sugarcane harvesting is the most costly operation in sugarcane farming. Although more sophisticated self-propelled sugarcane harvesters have been used in developed countries, manual harvesting is still practiced in most undeveloped countries like Ethiopia. A simple, efficient, and less complicated mechanical harvesting machine aid was desirable in areas where manual sugarcane harvesting. Manual sugarcane harvesting requires intensive labor, quite a lot of money, and time-consuming tasks that involve considerable human drudgery. So, this study focused on designing and developing sugarcane harvesting machines that are cheap, easily affordable by the farmers and sugar factories, easy to maintain, and less laborious to use. The developed sugarcane harvesting machine consists of a frame, discs with a cutting unit, shaft, safety frame, wheels, and five horsepower diesel engines. Hence this project work overcomes these problems and aims to develop a small-scale sugarcane harvesting machine. The materials used for construction and manufacturing were by considering the different parameters during operation and harvesting.