Michael K. Adeyeri, Khumbulani Mpofu, and Oluwadara C. Afolabi
Model Simulation, Soil heaping, Configuration, Four bar Mechanism
Farm mechanisation is a practice of doing work on agricultural farms by means of machinery instead of human or animal labour. Land preparation, tillage, planting and harvesting operations are all farm practices that have been mechanized. Three forms of bed preparation are commonly used in farming namely; flat, heaps and ridges. Ridge-making has been mechanised, leaving heaping to be done manually using the locally fabricated hand-made hoe. In this research work, an attempt is made to design a four-bar mechanism to give the required working part motion for soil heaping operation. The angles and distance of the four positions were obtained and specified as input for the synthesis of the four-bar mechanism using four-position synthesis programmed in MATLABTM and the link lengths calculated were input to Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems (ADAMS) to simulate the behaviour of the mechanism from which the best design was selected. Results suggested that the method of four-position synthesis could be used to design an appropriate mechanism for the heaping operation. The mechanical advantage of the mechanisms obtained was in the range 0.5 – 2.1. Different parameters of interest like the output force were also obtained for each of the mechanisms.
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