DEVELOPMENT OF PUSH TYPE BATTERY POWERED REAPER
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Date
2016
Authors
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Publisher
AAU, Anand
Abstract
Harvesting of crop is one of the important agricultural operations which demand considerable amount of labour. The availability and cost of labour during harvesting season are the serious problem. The shortage of labour during harvesting season and vagaries of the weather causes great losses to the farmers. It is therefore, essential to adopt the mechanical methods so that the timeliness in harvesting operation could be ensured. The use of mechanical harvesting device has been increased in the recent years. But, these means especially combine, are very costly making it un-affordable to most of the small farmers. Although, some manual operated reapers were developed. But, due to limitations of manual power, none of them become popular as the power available for cutting and conveying of the crop as well as was transportation of the machine not sufficient. Therefore, push type battery powered reaper was designed and developed, in which the cutting and conveying was done mechanically by means of electric power and transportation by means of manual power. The battery powered reaper include the battery, DC motor, crop row dividers, star wheel, standards cutter bar having 76.2 mm pitch knife section, vertical conveyor chain and gear box. The weight of the developed reaper with the battery was found 32 kg. The performance of the developed reaper was evaluated in wheat field by varying forward speed, cutting angle and cutter bar speed. The reaper was able to cut two rows at a time placed 22.5 cm apart. The total harvesting losses was found 2.67% of total yield. The field capacity and field efficiency was found 0.069 ha/h and 85.06%, respectively at forward speed of 1.55 km/h. The performance of the developed reaper was also compared with the traditional method of harvesting by sickle and mechanical harvesting by SPVCR. Harvesting losses found for developed reaper, SPVCR and sickle were 2.67, 2.02 and 1.03%, respectively. The cost of harvesting of wheat was found maximum with manual local sickle (Rs 3859.50/ha), followed by SPVCR (Rs 868.5/ha), whereas the lowest cost was recorded with the developed reaper (Rs 763.20/ha). Therefore, net saving of Rs 3096/ha was observed with the developed reaper over traditional manual harvesting of wheat crop by sickle and Rs 105.30/ha over SPVCR.
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Keywords
Agri Engineering, development