27th National Convention of Production Engineers National Seminar on Advancements in Manufacturing - Vision 2020 25th – 26th May, 2012 Paper No. 03_32 *Email: saha@mech.iitd.ac.in (Corresponding author) Improved Design of Gearbox for Animal Driven Prime Mover J. Bahuguna 1 , M. Patni 2 , V. Trigune 2 and S. K. Saha 1* 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi-110016 2 Department of Applied Mechanics Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi-110016 Abstract: Animal being a very useful resource in rural areas, an attempt has been made to develop a sustainable product which uses animal power as its input and can be utilized to support Indian agriculture. For this an animal driven prime mover, having a speed enhancement gearbox as one of its main components was studied by IIT Delhi in 2003. Here the improved design of that gearbox is provided which utilizes some advance design tools like MATLAB and Autodesk Inventor. For fast computation, all the design equations were programmed in MATLAB while the Autodesk Inventor provided quick visualization of the movement. Such tool allows one to systematically study such gearboxes to check their designs, e.g., whether they are over-designed or under-designed. In this paper, one such gear box made by Panchal Pumps Ltd., Kanpur, India was studied in detail and modifications were conveyed to the manufactures. Keywords: Animal, Gearbox, Design 1. Introduction India is predominantly an agricultural country, where about 70% of population lives in rural areas and depends on the agriculture. Animals have been very useful resource for the development of the rural areas and have proved to be a renewable, sustainable and holistic source of energy. At present the draught animals provide around 27 million MW of electrical energy to Indian agriculture with the total value of Rs.408 billion. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the continued use of draught animals which is a renewable energy source for sustained agriculture in comparison with the rapidly decreasing reserves of the non-renewable energy sources. Hence, we need to focus on developing technologies to efficiently harness animal power, particularly for all the rural agro-industrial activities for the sustainable development. India is emerging as a technical giant but people residing in rural areas are still using the tools and equipment which have become either obsolete or are inefficient (Singh, 1999 [1]), hence affecting the overall quality of the end products. As these problems are local in nature and generally goes unattended, therefore must be taken care of. The draught animal power is being utilized in various fields like water pumping (Figure1), sugarcane crusher, grain grinder, electricity generation etc., by the use of animal driven prime mover. Joshi and Tiwari [2] suggested the use of hydraulic system, plank ratchet system, drum rope system, rotary gear system etc. to extract the draught animal power. Out of all these rotary gear system is found most effective.