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Design and Development of a Trailed Type Transplanter for Oil Palm Seedling
Abstract:
A trailed type transplanter that is run by a four-wheel tractor with at least 63.4 kW for field transplanting of oil palm seedlings had been designed, developed, and tested. AutoCAD 2000 software was used to produce the 3-D conceptual design of the proposed machine system. Computations were made to determine the required total hydraulic pressure to operate all actuators within the hydraulic system of the transplanter.
The machine configuration consisted of the main chassis, seedling bin, seedling planting assembly, operator compartment, and associated hydraulic system. Two operators were required in the transplanting operation—a driver for the tractor and an operator for the transplanter. The involved operational activities included preparations of planting hole, placement of seedling in the prepared hole, covering of the seedling in the prepared hole, and compacting of the soil around the planted seedling. An area size of 200 m length and 56 m width at the university farm was chosen to be the test plot for the five-day field evaluations. A special time and motion study was conducted on the sixth day of the field evaluation to include additional activity concerning removal of plastic polybag from seedling before planting. The test plot soil was from Serdang series with sandy clay loam texture classification. A triangular planting pattern with density of 160 palms/ha, planting distance of 850 cm, and row distance of 736 cm was employed in the test plot.
Results of the field evaluations indicated that this mechanized transplanting system had a planting capacity of 99 seedlings/man-day or 0.62 ha/man-day as compared with the 0.28 ha/man-day or 45 seedlings/man-day with the manual transplanting planting system. The estimated planting cost was MYR2.11 per seedling with mechanized transplanting as compared to MYR2.26 per seedling with manual transplanting. Conclusively, this mechanized transplanting system could give 2.2 times improvements in the planting capacity and 6.64 percent reduction in the transplanting cost. A cost saving of MYR0.15 per seedling was obtained with the mechanized system over the manual system.