Design and selection of agricultural machinery using a quality function deployment technique

Abstract

The demand of agricultural machinery has been increasing day by day due to lack of availability of human power and increasing the cost of cultivation. The agricultural machinery development is hundreds of time what they were several years ago. The growth of agro industry depends on the farmers; so the production of farm products must be based on farmer’s requirement. Even though they are producing required products still there is a gap between farmers and designers. The most agricultural machinery operator having suffered injuries on shoulder, wrist and elbow, most researchers have concentrated their attention on propelling efficiency or biomechanics issues, not operation interface based on operator s’ requirements. Though some innovative changes have been introduced in the engineering aspect, they are not as popular as expected in rural and urban areas because of the lack of knowledge from farmers. Hence a study was proposed to compile the farmer’s requirements and designers possibilities by using a simple technique of Quality function deployment (QFD). A survey was conducted to identify the farmers, dealers problems and requirements by a group of technical people and the opinions were compared and finally the majority opinions were sorted out and fitted in QFD approach to identify the major needs and problems of farmers for designing and development of machinery based on their opinions’ at the production level of agro industry.