I had visited Kansas and Missouri along with my wife Bonmayuri during the Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, 2004. We camped at Ganesh Bora’s at Manhattan, Kansas, and from there visited Topeka, Kansas City, and Wichita.. Symanta Saikia, a student at WSU double-majoring in Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering gave us a tour of his beautiful campus situated in Kansas’s biggest city Wichita. Ganesh Bora with his invention at KSU I also had a chance to visit Ganesh’s laboratory. Ganesh is a PhD candidate in Biological and Agricultural Engineering at KSU. He showed me the many different projects going on in his Department. Ganesh is working on development of a Variable Rate Anhydrous Ammonia Applicator using Multi-point Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) metering system. The project is sponsored by Capstan Agricultural System Inc., Pasadena, CA.
Anhydrous Ammonia is most popular source of fertilizer in North America but its physical and chemical properties make it one of the most potentially dangerous agricultural chemicals. Traditional applicators have trouble in metering the flow due to its volatility and applied much more than it is required. They did not care much since ammonia is very cheap, until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started looking into the ground water contamination by ammonia. Ganesh’s equipment controls the flow rate by controlling the duty cycle of the pulse width of the valve. The PWM valves are used with a heat exchanger to keep the ammonia liquid. The heat exchanger is built from stacked aluminum plates and houses two valves in a plate. Each valves feeds ammonia to a knife which in turn injects it to the ground. The number of plates can be increased to increase the number of valves depending upon the machine. Ganesh built the prototype and evaluated the equipment at KSU and handed over the details to the sponsoring company. The company has started commercial production under the brand name N-Ject and the farmers in the Midwest are already using it.
Recently, the equipment has been selected for the AE50 Award by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE). The award is given annually by ASAE for new industrial development in farm machinery and its acceptance by the users. This year it will be presented to our own Ganesh Bora during its Annual International meeting to be held on 1–4 Aug, 2004 in Ottawa, Canada. .Congratulations, Ganesh!
Reported by Jugal Kalita, Colorado
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