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The Ethiopian Ard plough is the most commonly used farm tool in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, using this plough as farm tool is labour intensive, time taking, making shallow depth and narrow cutting width. Thus, this research is initiated to come up with a solution to the aforementioned problems. Therefore, the objectives of this research were to model the basic components of animal drawn multiple mouldboard plough, to fabricate and test the prototype. Eight alternative options were considered for conceptual design among these, without seat to operator, two wheels, two handles and beam attachment design alternative is selected using merit-demerit analysis, pairwise and direct matrix ranking methods. In addition, after the detail design, the prototype is fabricated in Bahir Dar University Institute of Technology Workshop using locally available materials and tested using oxen and horses as draft animals in two most dominant soil types such as Nitrosol and Vertisols at Burie and Gozamin districts of East and West Gojjam Zones of Amhara regional state respectively. The results of the field test reveals that there is a significant difference between Ard plough and the newly designed prototype in time requirements to plough the same plot of land, draft force requirements and cutting width. The newly designed prototype reduces time spent and increasing cutting width during primary tillage. The draft force requirement of both Ard plough and multiple mouldboard plough is higher at Nitrisols than Vertisols. The multiple mouldboard plough cut of width and depth can be adjusted to go along with the available draft animal for optimum field operation performance. |
