Students Design Stone Crusher to Increase Agricultural Productivity

Scattered stones on agricultural lands damage agricultural machinery, impede farmers, and prevent crops from growing properly. Students at the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics have worked to overcome this problem by designing a stone gathering and crushing machine.

Sameh Abu Ghosh, Basil Dalbah, Suhaib Mansour and Mahdi Al Salem presented a design for a machine dragged by an agricultural tractor that can collect scattered stones, with a crusher that smashes the stones and converts them into gravel. This process, according to the students, increases the permeability of the soil to water and decreases the conglomerate of the soil when it is repeated multiple times.

The crusher uses moving hammers to strike the stones multiple times until they become a small size, suitable to exit the sieve and fall to the ground. The machine is monitored through electrical sensors that measure the rotational speeds of the parts. If the speed of any part falls below a specified value, a warning is given to the tractor’s driver to take the appropriate action.

Project supervisor Professor Sameh Abu Awwad said that the project was designed in cooperation with Naqab, a company for agricultural tools, and funded by Al Nayzak.