Chaff cutter is one of the agricultural equipment used to chop all kinds of green and dry fodder into small pieces to feed animals. Due to less cost and ease of operation, it is available in every household owning cattle. It is most common and widely available machines used twice a day to chopped the fodder. The operation on existing chaff cutters is physically demanding because of the high energy requirement and continuous adoption of awkward work postures. Size reduction operation is considered to be one of the most energy-intensive or energy inefficient operations. The force exerted while cutting the chaff in the static position pose work related musculoskeletal disorders in performing the activity. The power required to cut the fodder by existing chaff cutter was very high than power applied by the operator for cutting. Which leads to high physiological demand and more energy expenditures throughout the degree of rotation flywheel. Interventions or design modification for redu

Manual fodder cutter, Livestock, Ergonomics, India.

The existing manual chaff cutter was evaluated in terms of power required in cutting different types of fodder and power available by human for cutting. The experiment was conducted by varying number of blades on flywheel i.e., one, two, three and four and respectively reducing the throat area by full, half, one third and one fourth from throat area of existing chaff cutter. It was observed that power required in cutting fodder reduces with increase in number of blade and reduction in throat area. The huge gap between power available and power required in cutting is minimum for four blade cutter and maximum for single blade cutter. The through output has no effect with increase in blade number but length of cut reduces with increase in number of blades. The ergonomic assessment of operator were also done in terms of heart rate and energy expenditure. The energy expenditure for three blade was minimum and lie in “moderate work load”. Therefore, according to experiment three blade

Sinha, J. and Kumar, A. (2021). Ergonomically Evaluating and Modifying Fodder Cutter by Increasing Number of Blades and Varying Throat Geometry. Biological Forum – An International Journal, 13(2): 110-119.