Development and Performance Evaluation of Battery Operated Garlic Clove Planter

Abstract

India is the second largest producer of garlic in the world and uses garlic as a newlinespice or condiment. The area, production and productivity of garlic in India are 431.22 newlinethousand ha, 3523.44 thousand MT and 8.17 MT/ha, respectively during 2021-22. The newlinemechanization of garlic cultivation is mainly limited to the land preparation machines. newlineSome progressive farmers have been reported to adopt tractor-operated or animal drawn newlineplanter for garlic planting but due to high initial and operational cost of tractor and newlineplanters limits the small and marginal farmers. Hence, a battery-operated garlic planter newlinewas developed to suit small and marginal farmers, which shares major workload of newlineoperator by providing ease in planting operation, to ensure precise planting, timeliness newlineand eco-friendly machine. A laboratory soil bin study was undertaken to optimize the newlinecups size of the metering mechanism, operating speed of the planter and to finalize the newlinedifferent components of the traction drive wheel system such as motor (BLDC motor newlineof 750 W, 48 V), motor controller, batteries (4 batteries of 12 V, 26 Ah). The study of newlinephysical and mechanical properties of garlic cloves were done to select the garlic newlinevariety for the study.The garlic variety of G-282 was selected for the study based on the different newlinephysical and mechanical parameters observed. Some of the observed values of the newlinegarlic variety were, length, width and thickness of 21.36 × 9.38 × 5.08 to 27.80 × 12.80 newline× 9.45 mm, mass of 0.83 to 2.35 g, sphericity of 0.43 to 0.61, geometric mean diameter newlineof 10.06 to 14.98 mm, arithmetic mean diameter of 11.94 to 16.68 mm2, aspect ratio of newline0.44 to 0.46, surface area of 317.88 to 705.14 mm2, bulk density of 478.32 to 484.65 newlinekg/m3, coefficient of static friction of 0.29 to 0.35 and angle of repose of 39.00 to newline43.50°. The optimized independent parameters of the planter in soil bin study were newlinefound to be size of cup (S1) and forward speed of 1.5 km/h. The field evaluation of the newlinemachine was carried out with optimized independent parameters and