Abstract:
Tile manufacture is a leading developing industry in Sri Lanka. A tile is manufactured using
ceramic, stone, metal, baked clay, or glass. It is commonly used to cover objects such as roofs,
floors, walls or tablets and it has great demand in markets. Clay important material for making
porcelain and ceramic tiles. When using clay, the clay needs to crush for a specific scale. There
are several clay crushing machines available in markets such are traveling breaker plate mills,
high tonnage hammer mills, pulverisers, impact dryer mill and others. The existing machines
facing issues in crushing wet clay. The machines get sticky, and it reduces the machine
efficiency. The machines need additional labour support to remove all the sticky clay from the
machines. The wet clay crusher machine is proposed to the title manufacturing industries for
increase efficiency, reduce production costs, and reduce maintenance costs. The proposed
machine has two types of special shafts. Two shafts with ratchet wheels, it’s placed bottom of
the machine and a block shaft is placed on top of the ratchet wheel shafts. Ratchet wheels use
to crush the clay. Block shaft uses to push the clay into the middle of the ratchet wheel shafts.
These shafts are rotating by a three-phase motor. The motor connects to the shafts through a
gearbox. There is a gearbox for reducing the motor speed and increasing torque. The mechanical
design avoids the sticky problem. The rates of the clay crushing process are significantly higher
more than labour-power. The final shafts rotation speed is 128 rpm. This constant speed helpful
the good crushing process and, this machine's power consumption is 0.745kwh. The machining
process crushes 2kg of wet clay within 5 seconds and the machine maintenance cost and power
consumption are lower than labour costs for the crushing process.
