Using Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) for Performing Good Ploughing with Mouldboard

Abstract

Farm management needs creative methods to success. FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) is a new method to analyze potential reliability problems in the development cycle of the project, making it easier to take actions to overcome such issues, thus enhancing the reliability through design or process. Anticipating these failure modes, being the central step in the analysis, needs to be carried on extensively, in order to prepare a list of maximum potential failure modes. Risk is measured in terms of Risk Priority Number (RPN) that is a product of occurrence, severity, and detection difficulty. This study attempted to improve clod mean weight diameter and soil inversion as indicators of tillage quality by FMEA methodology. The results showed that low soil moisture, slow speed of ploughing and great depth of ploughing is the most important factors that increase clod MWD with 900, 630 and 560 RPN, respectively. Also for soil inversion the slow speed of ploughing, not using coulter, low soil moisture and great depth of ploughing are important factors with 720, 648, 490 and 420 RPN. Using a split - split factorial experiment with 16 treatments and three replications also acknowledged the results of this method. After reforming the conditions and re-testing the experiment, results showed that clod MWD was reduced 20% and soil inversion increased 2% approximately. This study proposes the use of this technique in agricultural management.

Keywords

• Clod mean weight diameter
• Failure modes and effects analysis
• Soil inversion
• Tillage