Students Make Bricks Using Sugarcane Waste Ash Bannari Amman Institute Technology BIT Civil Engineering Department Futura 2007

Students Make Bricks Using Sugarcane Waste Ash

Students Make Bricks Using Sugarcane Waste Ash

Bagasse, obtained as waste after crushing sugarcane, is burnt for power

Innovations: Bricks manufactured using sugarcane waste are stronger than ordinary bricks, say civil engineering students of BIT, in Erode.

Sathyamangalam: Civil Engineering students of the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology here have manufactured bricks using ash, obtained after burning bagasse.

Dump yard

Bagasse, obtained as waste after crushing sugarcane, is burnt for power. The ash has hitherto remained unused. One of the five students, C. Sudheesh, says he stumbled upon the idea while observing the ill effects of the ash.

The boy from Sathyamangalam says, “From the dump yard, ash flies around and settles on floors, office tables, and almost everywhere, causing not only inconvenience but also health hazards for those living nearby.

Hence, I thought of putting the ash to good use and that was the first step for our project.”

He joined his classmates M. Anbarasan, R. Durai Karthikeyan, M. R. Prabhu and G. Ravikumar – all from the third of the Civil Engineering Department – to put the ash to good use.

After having failed in the attempt to use the ash as a road-binding material, the boys decided to use the ash in bricks.

They mixed clay with the ash and granite waste in various proportion and burnt the brick.

“The ash and granite waste gelled well with the clay to give us a brick that is almost twice as strong as the ordinary brick,” says Mr. Anbarasan.

The students, however, are quick to add that the experiments are in the initial stages and that they will have to arrive at an optimum mixture and thereafter conduct series of experiments before going in for mass production.

Experiments

Nevertheless, the initial results have only been encouraging. The water absorption capacity of the ash-brick is less. “It is only 18 per cent,” says Mr. Sudheesh.

As and when the boys succeed, they will not only use of ash to strengthen the bricks, but also reduce the use of the top layer of soil, which is fertile and causes environment degradation.

The boys won the third prize for their project at Futura 2007, an open house science exhibition organised recently by the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology.

Students Make Bricks Using Sugarcane Waste Ash

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