Author(s):

Jitendra Kumar, Satish Kumar, Ashok Kumar and Umesh Singh

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in microbial techniques of composting and Vermicomposting of farm, urban and agro-industrial wastes. It is being increasingly realized that composting is an environment- friendly process to convert a wide variety of into valuable agricultural inputs and in the process minimize their becoming environmental problems. Manufacturing vermicompost needs lot of manual labor for mixing and grinding of cow dung with straw and other organic waste material, which should be minimized with the help of a mechanical unit. This helps in reducing time, cost and also improving the quality of final product. A mechanical grinding machine has been designed and developed for vermicompost with reduced size of leaf wastes at STEP, IIT Kharagpur. The machine element consists of a motor, gear box, shaft, adjustable blade, bearing, drum and switch and adjustment blade shaft. This machine carried out grinding of all types of dry and moist items. The electric motor operated batch type media mixer has blade type agitators provided on a shaft rotating at 210 rpm for thorough mixing. The mixer has a capacity varying from 250 to 300 Kg per batch and takes 6 minutes for thorough mixing of vermicompost. The grinding machine has capacity of 250 to 300 Kg per batch for moist leaf wastes. The grinding machine was found to be best for 30 Kg dry leaf wastes on operation for six minutes. Vermicompost manufactured from the raw material noted lowest N content (0.8%) for cow dung and that prepared from mixture of Black old tea + Cow dung noted highest N content (3.14%). The Phosphorus content of raw materials varied between 0.25 for Cow dung to 0.96 % for the mixture of Poultry manure (old) and Cow dung in the ratio of 25:75. The p^H of raw materials varied between 5.5 for Black (old) Tea to 7.4 for Poultry manure (new). pH value in case of manufactured vermicompost for all the cases was found between 5.1 for Black (old) Tea and 7.1 for Poultry manure (new). For getting optimal quality of vermicompost temperature and moisture content are ranging between 30-35 0C and 30-45% on dry weight basis respectively. From the values of grinding machine performance indices it would be concluded that performance of designed grinding machine is satisfactory.

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