A tool for semi-automated extraction of cotton gin energy consumption from power data

Authors: Donohoe, Sean; Alege, Femi; Thomas, Joseph

Submitted to: AgriEngineering
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/28/2023
Publication Date: 8/31/2023
Citation: Donohoe, S.P., Alege, F.P., Thomas, J.W. 2023. A tool for semi-automated extraction of cotton gin energy consumption from power data. AgriEngineering. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering5030093.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering5030093

Interpretive Summary: Electricity accounts for nearly 17% of the cost of making a cotton bale. Of this, the gin stand is often the second largest user of the electricity. Reducing the amount of electricity needed to gin cotton would be helpful to the ginners. Standard tools can measure power used while ginning. However, manually extracting active ginning energy and ginning time is slow. The process is even more slow when trying to separate energy into multiple parts. If done, separating energy allows one to view the increase in energy due to active ginning as well as the energy used just to run the gin stand. This work provides a semi-automated method to do just that. In addition to getting the energy components, the method also calculates ginning time, and average power. The method can accept data files containing multiple runs of cotton in a single recording.

Technical Abstract: Studies have shown that the gin stand is the second largest consumer of electricity in the ginning operation, while electricity accounts for nearly 17% of the average expense per bale. If gin stand energy consumption is predictable based on cotton cultivar there may be room to optimize and lower these expenses. Others have used power loggers to report energy information, however, such loggers typically do not detect active ginning. Furthermore, the total energy consumed is composed of two parts that are desirable to separate out. The first part is the baseline energy (i.e., the energy to move the saws, gears, belts, bearings, even if not actively ginning). The second is the active energy, this is the energy that does work on the cotton plus any extra losses. The current method provides a semi-automated way to analyze typical power logger data and extract periods of active ginning. The method allows multiple periods of active ginning in a single file and can separate the total energy into the active and baseline components. Other metrics of interest that the software calculates includes ginning time, and average power. The Appendix includes the source code for the method discussed.