Abstract:
The wear of tillage tools is a major source of economic constraints to local farmers. Estimating
wear in the field is time consuming and expensive. Abrasive wear testing machines developed in
advanced countries are not available in Ghana. This makes the study of wear related problems at
laboratory levels difficult in the country and most third world research laboratories. The main
objective of this study was to develop and evaluate equipment for testing the abrasive wear of
tillage tools in the laboratory. The equipment consists of a circular soil bin, support frame,
power transmission system and arm-subassemblies. The equipment was evaluated using a cast steel ploughshare in soils from KNUST (Anwomaso Research Farm, 69% sand), Wenchi (67%
sand), Ho (73% sand), Mampong (68% sand) and Akatsi (83% sand), all in Ghana. The wear
experiment was arranged in a completely randomized design with the soils from the five sites as
the treatment. Each treatment was replicated five times. The wear rate of soils from Akatsi and
Ho showed increasing trend with increasing moisture content while that of Wenchi and Mampong showed a reverse trend up to 13% and 15% moisture content, respectively. The soil from
Akatsi produced the highest wear of 4.11g. The wear in the soils from Ho, Mampong, Wenchi
and KNUST were 3.16g, 2.90g, 2.88g and 1.36g, respectively with the least wear from the
KNUST soil. This confirms the long-held belief that the wear rate of tillage tools is directly related to the sand content of the soil. The abrasive wear characteristics of the soils showed strong
correlation between mass loss and dimensional loss of the ploughshare
