Development of a Mobile Liquid Spraying Machine for Small and Medium Scale Crop Production

This article presents the design, simulation, fabrication and performance evaluation of a liquid spraying machine for application of pesticides in a small and medium scale crop plantation. In this article, components of the conceptualized spraying machine were modelled and assembled in SolidWorks CAD environment. The modelled components were designed in order to obtain design parameters for simulation. An extensive simulation on the stress and strain analysis was carried out on the designed components. The significance of the simulation is to predict the structural integrity and performance of the component parts of the machine before fabrication. The components were fabricated from locally sourced material in order to ensure a lower cost of production. The fabricated spraying machine was tested and the performance indicated that a field efficiency of 79% is obtainable in an average time of 1374 s to spray a maize crop field area of 1813 m2 having an average crop height of 0.52m. Further observations from the performance analysis also show that the field efficiency of the spraying machine drops to a value of 75% when used in a crop field area of 2206.3 m2. This is an indication that the spraying machine’s efficiency will reduce as the field area increases. In essence, the significance of the approach presented in this article is to ensure that the simulation predicts the performance of the design and the fabrication of the spraying machine using locally sourced material will ensure lower cost of fabrication.