MODELING OF PROTOTYPE FOR GINNING SODOM APPLE PLANT

Abstract

Ginning process plays an important role in separating fibers from seeds, efficient ginning process provides farmers with viable and undestroyed seeds for plant type preservation and good fibers for textile processing. Due the great divergence in characteristics between sodom apple fibers and seeds and those of cotton, preliminary experiments showed that cotton ginning machines is incompatible with that able to gin sodom apple. Experiments were carried out with four drum speed, 1.05, 2.10, 3.15 and 4.20 m/s (100, 200, 300 and 400 r.p.m), concave clearances (0.005, 0.010, 0.015 and 0.020 m) and number of drums (one drum and two drums).Results showed that the two drums prototype at 0.005 m clearance and 4.20 m/s drum rotational speed was the optimal performing system as the productivity is 1.85 times that of one drum, seed damage, fiber losses percentage, energy requirements and criterion costs is decreased by 6.98, 13.32%, 48.69 % and 45% than that of one drum at the same operating conditions respectively. The dimensional analysis was reasonably accepted for predicting the separation time with coefficient of determination 0.96, that helps in producing large scale ginning machines.