Design and construction of a bicycle operated boom spray pump.

Abstract

Spraying is one of the agricultural practices that are needed to ensure optimum crop growth and increase in the yields. It refers to the process of applying liquid chemicals to the crops or agricultural field with an aim of supplying essential nutrients, controlling pests and diseases and controlling unwanted weeds in the agricultural field. The demand of agricultural products increases day by day due to the rampant increase in the world’s population. So food production should be looked at with a keen eye in order to provide sufficient food to the population at a fair price to everybody. Agricultural practices are gradually changing from depending on human power and draft animal power to majorly mechanical power. This is because of the increasing maintenance costs of animal draft and human power. therefore, it is mechanical power that has become economical and can facilitate the efficient usage of resources such as land, inputs, and others. 69 percent of the population of people in Uganda are employed by agriculture with 89 percent of it being small family farmers who produce around 80 percent of total annual agricultural output. Most of these small house hold farmers face a lot of problems during farming and they end up producing poor quality produces that do not comply with the international market standards. This has exponentially affected the reliability of the country’s economy on agriculture. Most Small scale farmers use knapsack sprayers to spray where the sprayer has to be mounted on back and requires the lever to be operated manually in order to spray. Continuous weight on back of the farmer leads to back pain and manual pumping leads to wastage of efforts of the farmers. Therefore, farmers get biased with the process of spraying. Even the sprayers that could have solved these problems (like tractor boom sprayer) are so expensive to purchase or hire. The bicycle operated boom spray pump was therefore designed, fabricated and tested not only solve the problems above, but also have a small width which increases its applicability in different varieties of crops grown. There is increased encouragement of the use of non-conventional spray pump, time spent during spraying will be reduced and it also encourages usage of the available materials. The machine consists of the bicycle, the piston pump and the 20 litre tank, the driver and driven sprockets, the crank mechanism, four nozzles, the control valve, and the integrated horse pipes. The machine is mechanically powered by pusing the bicycle and changing the rotary motion of the sprockets into the reciprocketing motion that is transferred to the pump. This pressurizes the liquid chemicals within the cylinder of the piston hence aiding its movement through the pipes. the machine was tested in the field giving a field efficiency of 92.5% and application rate of 130.8 litres per acre with a discharge of 0.6672 litres per minute.