NCEA - Cotton Research
Agricultural Engineers to Reduce Energy Uses by Cotton
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture (NCEA) Dr Guangnan Chen, Craig Baillie and postgraduate student Siti Amni Ismail is undertaking a project to evaluate opportunities for energy saving in the cotton ginning processes.
The project aims to determine the operational energy costs of ginning process and identify the opportunities for energy saving. It will also be built on the previous projects funded by Cotton Research and Development Corporation, and Queensland Framers Federation for the research team.
"Energy efficiency in farming operations is becoming increasingly important in the context of rapidly rising energy costs and concern on greenhouse gas emissions," Dr Chen said.
"Within highly mechanised production systems such as those used within the Australian cotton industry, energy inputs represent a major cost to the grower and processor".
"Considerable opportunities exist for the improvement of energy efficiency in the cotton harvest and post-harvest processes".
Ginning is an important operation with the cotton production system. However, there is currently little data available for the optimisation of ginning operation, particularly from the energy efficiency perspective.
Case studies of cotton ginning operations will be undertaken as part of the project. Energy use data will be collected and analysed and energy costs will be broken down to key major components to determine where energy savings can be made.
Opportunities for improving energy efficiency will be identified in key processes including drying, cleaning, gin stand where seed is removed and in the baling machine.
The project also aims to identify areas for product quality improvement in the cotton ginning process.
Data obtained from the project can be fed into the farm energy calculator EnergyCalc developed by the research team. The project may also be extended to include the development of hardware tools for field measurements.
The project is expected to be completed by September 2009. The project is being funded by a grant from the Cotton Research and Development Corporation.