Reduction of Drudgery in Groundnut Decortication Through Use of Improved Equipment

摘要

Groundnut decortication is generally done by women workers. The traditional practice involves breaking of the pods with hands. Here the work is monotonous, involves abrasion of fingers and work output is very low resulting in high cost of operation. To overcome these problems, manually operated groundnut decorticators have been developed at CIAE Bhopal. The study was conducted to compare the output and the heart rate responses of women workers while operating these groundnut decorticators with that of traditional practice. Two groundnut decorticators developed at CIAE Bhopal were used for the study viz. standing type and sitting type. The parameters used for comparison were heart rate, work output and the muscular effort required for handle operation. Split plot design was used for the experiment. Four women subjects participated in the experiment and three replications were done for each trial. The ambient conditions during experiment were dry bulb temperature 26°C to 31°C and relative humidity 55% to 90%. Each trial was of 30 min duration. After the completion of each trial, a rest of 15 min was given to the subject. Data on heart rate were recorded with the help of Polar heart rate monitor. Data on strokes/min, force applied, quantity of groundnut pods per batch, unshelled/partially shelled pods, and damaged kernels were also noted. During decortication, the outputs with standing and sitting type decorticators were 33.0 kg/h and 26.3 kg/h as against 1.1 kg/h for traditional method. The mean working heart rate were 122, 111 and 85 beats/min for standing type decorticator, sitting type decorticator and traditional method, respectively. The corresponding HR (heart rate increase over rest) values were 42, 27 and 6 beats/min. The mean values of force required to operate the handle at the start of the batch was 72 N and 47 N for standing type and sitting type groundnut decorticators, respectively. The women workers preferred the sitting type groundnut decorticator due to its low requirement of force and less cardiac cost.