Design, fabrication and testing of banana fibre extraction machine

Abstract

Banana (Musa paradisiacal L) is the fourth most important crop in the world after rice, wheat and maize. Banana cultivation in Nepal is more popular like other agricultural products and has annual fibre production of about 1,977 tons. The thick, fleshy and fibrous pseudo stems that are left over after harvesting the bananas can be used to extract high quality fibre. Farmers usually throw away this whole stump because it is big and heavy and takes a long time to rot and the animals do not eat it. The cost of importing extraction machine from other country is expensive. The research and development of such machine with low cost, which ultimately provides opportunity of local entrepreneurship to farmers and helps in proper utilization of agricultural management, was felt necessary. The developed machine from this project, uses combined application of roller and a decorticator for fibre extraction. The machine can extract fibre from 1,648 Kg of input which is about 100-160 banana pseudostem. The fibre production obtained was 54 Kg per day with NRS. 11 operation cost per 1 Kg of fibre. The production efficiency in comparison to available commercial machine is 180 %.