SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS OF LOW COST WEEDER

Abstract

Weed management is one of the tedious operations in crop production. Because of labor costs, time and fully manual weeding is unfavorable. Hence effort is made to design and develop efficient Farm equipment to perform weeding without using electric power. This paper presents modeling, simulation, analysis, fabrication and testing of low cost three row weeder. The conception and key characteristics of simulation based design and the advantage of using it to design the driving mechanism of three row weeding equipment were discussed. The structure and mechanical parts of weeder were designed using CATIA with detail, including its three-dimensional modeling, assembly, interference checking, kinematics simulation, and two-dimensional engineering-drawing conversion etc. Later 3-D cad model is saved as (.stp) format and imported in ANSYS work bench environment and checked for Multibody dynamics simulation and Finite element analysis is done for safe design. The result shows that simulation based design technology can shorten the design & development period and reduce design cost.. The machine would be very useful for poor farmers. The cost of the commercial model of the equipment was estimated at Rs6500/-. The functional efficiency result of the manually operated weeder cum feeder on loamy soil was 81.4%, clay soil was 86.5% and sandy soil was 89.4% on of these soils. The overall machine field efficiency was 88.82% .