Development and Performance Evaluation of an Abrasive Wear Testing Equipment for Tillage Tools

Abstract

The wear of tillage tools is a major source of economic constraints to local farmers. Estimating wear in the field is time consuming and expensive. Abrasive wear testing machines developed in advanced countries are not available in Ghana. This makes the study of wear related problems at laboratory levels difficult in the country and most third world research laboratories. The main objective of this study was to develop and evaluate equipment for testing the abrasive wear of tillage tools in the laboratory. The equipment consists of a circular soil bin, support frame, power transmission system and arm-subassemblies. The equipment was evaluated using a caststeel ploughshare in soils from KNUST (Anwomaso Research Farm, 69% sand), Wenchi (67% sand), Ho (73% sand), Mampong (68% sand) and Akatsi (83% sand), all in Ghana. The wear experiment was arranged in a completely randomized design with the soils from the five sites as the treatment. Each treatment was replicated five times. The wear rate of soils from Akatsi and Ho showed increasing trend with increasing moisture content while that of Wenchi and Mampong showed a reverse trend up to 13% and 15% moisture content, respectively. The soil from Akatsi produced the highest wear of 4.11g. The wear in the soils from Ho, Mampong, Wenchi and KNUST were 3.16g, 2.90g, 2.88g and 1.36g, respectively with the least wear from the KNUST soil. This confirms the long held belief that the wear rate of tillage tools is directly related to the sand content of the soil. The abrasive wear characteristics of the soils showed strong correlation between mass loss and dimensional loss of the ploughshare.

Keywords: Abrasive wear, tillage tool, sand fraction, moisture content