Wear and tear of ground engaging components of agricultural machinery and equipment is one of the major problems faced by farmers specially when direct drilling. It reduces the working life of these components on one hand and increases the draft and vertical forces to keep these components well into the soil on the other. A survey conducted by NSW Agriculture in 1998 on the wear of narrow sowing points showed that many of the farmers need to replace these points just after a sowing of less than 1000 ha which is very expensive. Unlike conventional wide points or shares, narrow points are mostly operated at deeper depths and in undisturbed and hard soils. This causes faster wear rate and changes in point shape or profile, which can lead to unwanted depth changes as wear increases. Uneven wear of narrow points across the width of seeding and tillage equipment can cause greater depth variation. Therefore, wear resistance and mechanism of some of the commonly used materials, coatings and polymers for manufacturing and treating the surfaces of narrow sowing points and wide sweeps were tested and analyzed in the laboratory. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was used to observe the surface morphology of the materials after subjecting to wear. This study showed that materials such as Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMW-PE) has about five times better wear resistance than ordinary steel commonly used for producing ground engaging components of tillage tools.
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