Principle of Forage Chopper
Forage chopper is a size reduction process which can be done by pushing or forcing a thin sharp knife through the material to be chopper. When forage crop are used as feeds for animals, size of the fodder (forage) must be reduced as much as possible to aid proper feeding and palatability
The grinding performance and physical properties of wheat, barley straw, corn stove and switch grass were studied by (main at al., 2004). They showed that switch grass had highest specific energy consumption (27. 6 kwh/t) and corn steer had the at least specific energy consumption 11.0 kwh/t at 21.3.2mm screen size. But they did not repot their effect on the efficiency and capacity of the machine.
Adgidzi (2007) reported that, the average chopping rate for the dry materials was 24kg h and the average chopping rat for the materials was 15.6kgh. these values indicate that machine for form better with dry materials than the wet materials. But he did not examine the factors affecting portage chopper performance.
Therefore, the output capacity, chopping efficiency and length of cut of a forage chopper may be affected by the materials properties, physical properties of the material, and the cutting knife parameter (Adgisz, 2007).
Types of forage Chopper.
The forage can be chopped using two method which are;
1. Traditional method of chopping forage.
2. Modern method of chopping forage.
1. Traditional method of chopping forage; This involve the used of crude tools i.e olden days tools in cutting forage.
There are variour traditional farm tools used in cutting forage into desirable size which include:
(1) Cutlass
(2) Sickle
(3) Machete
(i) Machete:-This is a sword-like tool used for cutting large plants with a chopping motion. A machete’s blade is usually 50 to 65 centimeter (cm) long, and up to three millimeters (mm) thick.
(ii) Sickle:- This is a traditional tools used for cutting long grass and some crops such as cereals, this is laving a semicircular blade and short handle.
(iii) Cutlass: This is the tools most commonly used by farmers there are two main types:- One has a slightly curved lade with a short wooden handle, while the other has a straight metal blade one edge of the metal blade is sharp and the other is blunt with a convex edge.
Modern Method of Forage Chopper
The literature indicate that there are
Three types of chopper which are:
(i) Flywheel,
(ii) Flail and
(iii) Cylindrical
Which had been used for agricultural forage chopping and published data suggested that power loss due to water resistance and mechanical loses are high in flail cutters but the accuracy of cutting was not acceptable.(Shallendra et al, 2004).
