Design and evaluation of vertical cup metering mechanism for urea briquette application

Abstract

Vertical cup feed metering device was designed and evaluated at Division of Agricultural Engineering, ICARIARI, New Delhi during 2013-14 for singulation and uniform placement of urea briquettes in two forms, viz. UB1 (3 g) and UB2 (2 g). Performance parameters like average spacing, multiple index, missing index, quality feed index and precision were measured. The metering device was tested for different cup size depth of 6.5mm (CS1), 3.5mm (CS2) and 2.5 mm (CS3) with hemi-spherical shape. The average spacing was significantly (P<0.05) influenced by different sizes of cup and sizes of briquette. Miss index was highly influenced by different cup sizes (P<0.05). The cup size (CS) influenced missing the most, followed by briquette size, but UB size did not influence missing index significantly. The briquette size influenced the multiple index most, followed by cup size of the metering mechanism (P<0.05). Quality of feed index was highly influenced by UB size, followed by CS of the metering mechanism. General mean of quality of feed index was 94.77%. The effect of urea briquette and cup size was found to be non-significant in case of precision. The general mean of precision was 13.30%. Based on the above parameters, optimum metering cup size was selected 6.5 mm and size of urea briquette UB1 for applicator development.

Keywords

• Metering device
• Miss index
• Multiple index
• Precision
• Urea briquettes.