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Currently, in Mexico exist problems for the handling, storage and transport of agricultural residues. In order to solve the great abundance and low density of these materials, the densification process is proposed as a solution. Some current machines use the extrusion principle, however, before selecting or designing these machines, it is necessary to know the mechanical behavior of the material. Thus, the main objective of this work was to determine the optimal parameters of the densification of fibrous materials.

The tested material was food for ruminants made up mainly of crop residues. Initially, a fractional factorial design, 25-1, was run to find the most important factors, which were moisture content, temperature, compaction pressure and size of particles by assessing the responses, density, durability and specific power consumption. As a result of the statistical analysis, factor relaxation time was neglected to be less significant. With the four remaining factors, a second order central composite design was run to obtain the functions of the responses. Afterwards, an optimization method allowed to find the following optimum responses: 657 kg/m3 of density, 95% of durability and specific power consumption of 7 J/g; and optimum levels of the factors: 14.87% of moisture content, 115C of temperature, 32.88 MPa of pressure and size of particles of 3/8 in. brief methods, quantitative results, and the significance of your findings.