الفهرس 
Rice-straw residue quantities and propertiesOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Objectives: The objectives of the present study are to manufacture and evaluate the performance of a rice-straw bales chopper for cutting rice-straw bales directly in the storage place to produce the suitable straw lengths for the manufacture of animal feed and compost. Methods&Results:Experiments were conducted to study some factors that affecting the performance of the developed chopping machine. The studied parameters were as follows:The investigated levels of flail cutting-knife speeds were 750, 920, 1090 and 1260 rpm (15.71, 19.28, 22.84 and 26.4 m/s). Meanwhile, the claw speeds levels were 9, 11, 13 and 15 rpm (0.19, 0.23, 0.27 and 0.31 m/s) respectively. Also, 12 and 24 flail cutting-knives were tested. The tested feeding platform tilt-angles were 20, 25 and 30 degree. The tested flail cutting-knives or claws spacing were 6 and 9 cm.Average and percentage of cutting length, machine productivity, power requirement and specific energy and estimating the costs of using the machine were measured The results indicated that , the optimum operation parameters were cutting-knives speed of 1260 rpm (26.4 m/s), platform tilt-angle of 20 degree, 24 cutting knives and claws (or cutting-knives) spacing of 6 cm, which gave the average cutting-length of rice straw about 5.19 cm, cutting-length percentage of rice straw < 8 cm around 74.54 %, machine productivity of 892 kg/h, power requirement about 5.05 kW and specific energy of 5.67 kW.h/t., the operation and production costs according to prices of year 2015 were 13.63 L.E./h and 15.27 L.E./ton, respectively .Conclusion; In the last times it has spread the use of rice-straw baler where significant portion of rice straw compress in the form of bales to avoid burn practices by farmers and so easy to handle and transport them to places of manufacture, so as to be used in various fields such as feed production and manufacture of organic fertilizers (compost). In manufacturing places when dealing with bales of rice straw require more labor to remove rice-straw bales twines and feed it to chopping machines, leading to increase the production costs. In addition to the decline in the productivity of machines used for chopping therefore, the rice-straw bales chopper developed to overcome the previous problems.