Evaluation and Standardization of Animal Driven Water Pump

Introduction

Animal have been, from times immemorial very helpful resources of nature for sustinance of human beings and has been harnessed for various animal products as well as renuable energy in the form of draught power, load carrying etc. The use of animals has been very ancient, however, the technologies for harnessing of animal energy has remained at a primitive level for a very long time. As a consequence, with the adventure of fossil fuels, the use of animals has greatly dwindled. Nevertheless, from all considerations, animal have proved to be a renewable, sustanable and a historic source of energy and with increasing thrust on renewable energy at a present times, it is imperitive to retask at harnessing animal power a fresh and develop static of art technologies to efficiently harness animal power particularly for all the rural agri-industrial and transport activites.    

Draught animals powered Indian agriculture to a greater extent. At present they provide energy to Indian agriculture equivalent to 27 million mega watts of electrical energy. The present total value of draught animals is Rs.408 billions. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the continued use of draught animals in agriculture which is a time tested renewable energy source for sustained agriculture in the face of dwindling reserves of the non renewable sources of energy. Use of animate sources of energy (human and draught animal power) is very predominant in the country and will continue to be so for many years due to the prevailing small sized land holdings and socio-economic conditions. The annual utilization of draught animals in different regions varies from about 300 hrs to 1500 hrs against the ideal utilization period of about 2400 hrs [1]. Note that the use of rotary motion operate agro-processing machines can increase the present utilization of the animal power. In that direction, an Animal Driven Prime Mover (ADPM) consisting of a step-up (typically 60 to 500 times) gearbox connected to a level driven by a pair of bullocks or horses is a multi-purpose for various mechanical power applications and the agro-processing and rural industrilazation applications like water pumping, chaff cutting, castor decorticator, oil expelling, winnowing, etc. An application in water pumping using an Animal Driven Prime Mover (ADPM) shown in figs. 1 and 2. The draught power in rotary mode which is usually available at 2-3 rpm can be efficiently connected to deserved highlits spreeds by design of a suitable gearbox and this naturally becomes a verable ADPM for various applications. In order to encourage the useage of ADPM, several individuals as well as organizations have been       to develop such devices during last 2-3 decades,  amongst them, Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering (CIAE) IN Bhopal, College of Agricultural Engineering (CAE) in Raichur, Kanpur Goshala Society (KGS),  Mr. R.S. Singh in Varanasi, M/s. Panchal Pumps and Systems in Kanpur, and several others may be cited. Each of them has targeted specific application based on their local needs. For example, KGS developed ADPM primarily for the electricity generation, where as the ADPM by M/s. Panchal Pumps and Systems has been mainly used for water pumping CIAE, Bhopal has been working on ADPM for multiple applications for a long time. A combative study of salient ADPMs was reported in [2]. 

Fig. 1 Animal driven water pump with gear box and bullocks

Motivation and Objectives

As mentioned above, various efforts have been made to develop different prototypes of the ADPMs, but all of those remained in the pilot level. They have not been regularly evaluated, field used or    

Work Plan and Gantt chart

The project officially begun on April 01, 2010, i.e., the day when IIT Delhi received the first installment of the payment. Immediately, actions were taken to hire the sanctioned staffs,

Fig. 2 Gear box by M/s. Panchal Pumps and Systems, Kanpur for testing at IIT Delhi

namely, one Sr. Project Assistant and one Project Attendant. Following the IIT Delhi interview procedures, the following people were recruited:

1. Mr. Raj Kumar Gupta, Sr. Project Assistant (Joined on 6th May, 2010)
2. Mr. Mangal Sharma, Project Attendant (Joined on 6th May, 2010)

Two M. Tech. students were also contacted during May - June, 2010 to help in the design and analysis of the gear box and obtaining the necessary data related to the project. In order to fulfill the objectives of the project, weekly meetings were held to discuss the progress of the work, and set the targets for the next week. During the weekly meetings, technical aspects, fundamental studies and literature search on the gear box, as shown in Fig. 1, were discussed. A sample page from the project discussion diary is attached in Appendix A.