CAPILLARITY TEST OF COMPOST AND SAND MIXTURE

• Main Author: FAUZAN (NIM: 23014043), AHMAD
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/20840
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Increase in the number of population and its growth results in increasing necessities of plant products, such as food and medicine. Meanwhile, field availability is decreasing so a certain process of intensification in agriculture is needed. One of the ways of doing it is by creating plant bioreactors. This bioreactor should be able to facilitate the transport of water and nutrition to root. Water transport in plant bioreactors has an important role in the carriage of nutritions in plants. To facilitate the transport, it's needed to engineer the space around the plant through the adding of compost, which is used materials from plants that contain capillary pipes. The structure of the space from bed composed by compost and sand, can facilitate water, air, the development of root system of the plant, and life system of varied soil biota. Inside that space, process intensification and production on demand mechanism are executed simultaneously. Here, plant bioreactors can be modelled as a constant bed which is composed by chunks of capillary pipes of compost and sand. <br /> <br /> <br /> The objective of this research is to collect bed characteristics, the leverage of bed variations in parameters in hydrodynamics, such as hold up (the binding ability of the bed of fluids) and capillarity value of a bed, so that comparisons between compost and sand to produce good beds can be achieved, in order to improve the transport of water from environment to plant roots. The draft of the research is divided into three main phases, i.e. literature reviewing, experiments, and data interpretation. Variations of bed used in the experiments consist of different sizes of compost and sand particles, i.e. 4-8 mesh, 8-14 mesh, 14-20 mesh, 20-35 mesh, and 35-48 mesh; and different variations or compost to sand composition, i.e. 100 : 0, 25 : 75, 50 : 50, 75 : 25 dan 0 : 100. Examination performed involves the testing of bed characteristics (porosity) and hydrodynamics examination, i.e. hold up and bed capillarity. <br /> <br /> <br /> The result of the research shows that the adding of compost will increase the number of porosity; fluid's hold up number increases if compost particle's size is smaller; capillarity of a bed increases with the mixture of compost and sand. Based on the results of the experiments, it is shown that compost to sand composition of 1 : 1, along with 35-48 mesh, is the better composition to increase porosity, hold up, and capillarity values of a bed.