Performance Evaluation of Mulching Machine as an Attachment to a Rotavator

Mulching is done to conserve moisture, improve the fertility & health of the soil, reduce weed growth, and enhance the Beauty of the area. Before the laying of mulch sheets, suitable seedbed preparation is major tasks before the farmers. Traditionally, seedbeds are prepared with help of draught animals or machines and then mulching is done by manually which is very time and energy consuming. However, each of these operations are done individually, resulted more time and energy requirement to complete the whole operation. Thus, a machine was developed which performs all required operations for mulching in a single pass to save operational time and energy. The performance of the machine was evaluated by determining effective field capacity, field efficiency, fuel consumption, energy requirement and mulch sheet covering percentage. Machine was tested at three levels of forward speed as 1.0-1.5 km/h, 1.5-2.0 km/h and 2.0-2.5 km/h. The highest effective field capacity of the machine was found as 0.1595 ha/h at the forward speed of 2.0-2.5 km/h. The highest field efficiency of the developed machine was obtained as 83.07 % at 1.0-1.5 km/h speed level. The lowest fuel consumption of developed machine was obtained as 3.0 l/h at 1.0- 1.5 m/h and the mulch sheet covering efficiency was 94%.