Briquette Compacting Machine: A Design for Rural Applications

This paper enumerates the design and synthesis of a mechanism for a fuel briquette compacting machine. The briquettes are made of a mixture of husk (rice or wheat or any other) and animal waste in appropriate proportions and compacted in the machine. Several experiments were initially conducted to arrive at the right proportions of water, husk, and dung, and to determine the force to compact the biomass. The pellets were dried in the sun and burnt in a stove. The final specifications of the machine were arrived based on these simple trials. There were several challenges in the machine development. The biomass mixture tends to cake and harden if the machine is left idle for long. It is not desirable for a briquette to crumble both in a wet as well as a dry state. The mechanism has to handle these requirements and as the machine, is to be manually operated frictional effects and any tendency to jam ought to be minimized. The engineering drawings of the machine are being freely distributed to rural mechanics who are desirous of replicating the machine, after observing the machine in action at CTARA at IIT Bombay. Several machines have thus been built and are operational in many villages. The paper covers such aspects and how a compact machine was arrived at through synthesis of an appropriate mechanism that is inherently not easily prone to "jamming" The synthesis is based on techniques derived from symmetric coupler curve generation.