Design, fabrication and testing of an engine driven irrigation pump

Abstract

An engine driven impeller irrigation pump was designed and fabricated. The project was carried out in order to develop a low cost and easily maintainable pump for farming in rural communities. The pump major components include the impeller, shaft, pipe (housing) and diesel engine. The suction end of the pump is dipped into a body of water and the diesel engine put on. The diesel engine provides drive through belt connections via pulley to the pump shaft. As the pump shaft rotates the impeller attached to one end of the shaft spins and creates a vacuum that pulls the water in the middle of an opening on the front of the impeller and throws it into the pipe. The water then flows inside the pipe and is collected at the outlet of the pipe. The pump was designed to have water head of 3 m and capacity of 650 l/m. The performance evaluation of the pump was carried out and the pump efficiency ranged from 61 to 71% thereby incurring losses of 39 to 21% respectively, which is as a result of power loss during the transmission of power via belt from the prime mover to the pump shaft pulley. The materials used for the construction of the pump were locally sourced but carefully selected. They had all the required mechanical properties such as strength, toughness, fatigue, resilience and corrosion resistance, as this will make the pump to be cheap and affordable to local farmers. If this pump is perfected and popularized adopted by farmers it will assist in reducing importation of pumps used for small scale farm irrigation purposes.