Performance studies on power operated arecanut sheath shredder for chopping of sheath used as an animal fodder

Abstract

Arecanut sheath is one of the important raw materials obtained from the arecanut palm. The sheath attached to the leaf of arecanut tree not only used for commercial plate making. But recently the arecanut sheath was investigated to use as a dry alternative fodder for cattles rather than rice straw in some parts of Kerala and Karnataka. The available machineries for chop making have been tried to chop the arecanut sheath into suitable fodder size. However, due to physical and biological character­istics of the arecanut sheath, none of them were found suitable to get desired size. Hence, arecanut sheath shredder was developed and evaluated for chopping of the arecanut sheath used as an alternative fodder for cattle’s. The performance of arecanut sheath shredder was evaluated at three different cylindrical cutter head speeds (13.1, 15.71 and 18.33 m s-1), three feed roller speeds (0.28, 0.36 and 0.45 m s-1) and numbers of knives (2, 3 and 4) was used, the effect of these operational parameters on output capacity and power consumption of shredder were determined.