Development and field evaluation of a small wheat thresher for hill region
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Date
2006-06
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G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar - 263145 (Uttarakhand)
Abstract
India is the second largest wheat producer after China. Wheat is grown under diverse agro climatic conditions and occupies more than 25 million hectare area with average production of 70 million tonnes. As the major Rabi crop, it recorded a production of 74.05 million tonnes in
2004-05, which exceeds last year‟s production by 1.94 million tonnes or 2.8 % (India 2006). Timely threshing of crops is essential in hilly region. There is enormous scarcity of machinery and non availability of small size machinery makes the job difficult in hills. Farmers in hill region use conventional method like hand beating, animal feet trampling for threshing crops. Which is a time consuming and laborious process. So there is a crucial need of small size wheat thresher which can work efficiently. The small wheat thresher developed by Dubey (2004), both cylinder and blower were mounted on a common shaft for which a desired threshing and cleaning efficiency were achieved with a greater percentage of visible grain damage and collective losses. The quality of bhusa obtained from the thresher was also not in permissible limit that is why not accepted by local farmers. Considering the above points there is a crucial need of small and efficient wheat thresher with maximum threshing and cleaning efficiency along with minimum losses and visible grain damage. Keeping the above point in view a small power wheat thresher having separate shaft for cylinder and blower was designed and fabricated in the Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Pantnagar. The performance of the thresher was evaluated on two varieties of wheat crops UP-2823 and UP-2625. The results reveled that the threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, collective loss, and visible grain damage, germination percentage and maximum length of bhusa are with in the norms of BIS standard. The optimum threshing parameters for the variety UP-2823 i.e. threshing efficiency 99.88%, cleaning efficiency 99.29%, germination percentage 92%, visible grain damage 1.76%, blown grain 1.1%, spilled grain 0.75% and maximum length of bhusa 11 mm were observed at feed rate of 5 kg/min, 22.9 m/s cylinder speed and 1440 rpm blower speed in treatment T18 (F2C3B3). Where as the same threshing parameters for the variety UP-2625 are 99.38%, 99.1%, 90%, 1.43%, 1.31%, 1.38%, 13 mm were observed at feed rate of 5.4 kg/min, 22.9 m/s cylinder speed and 1440 rpm blower speed in treatment T27 (F3C3B3) and which are upto the acceptable limits of BIS standard. The optimum output capacity of the thresher was found to be 0.14 t/h and 0.147 t/h for the varieties UP-2823 and UP-2625 respectively in actual field condition. A combination of 102 mm motor pulley, 127 mm of cylinder pulley and 102 mm of blower pulley was recommended to operate the thresher in order to obtain above mentioned threshing parameters. The power consumption of thresher at optimum speed was found to be 1.2 kW-h.
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