Design and Development of Automatic Groundnut Crop Thresher

Abstract:

The study has been conducted to design and develop an automatic groundnut crop thresher. Groundnut or peanut (Arachis hypogaea) is a species in the legume or “bean or Leguminosae” family. The design of functional components of automatic groundnut crop thresher has been carried out using Solid Works software. The development work has been carried out at Workshop, College of Agricultural Engineering, UAS, Raichur, Karnataka, India. Knife type threshing cylinder was designed and developed for the proposed thresher. Belt conveyor was used to feed the freshly harvested groundnut crop from feeding hopper to threshing cylinder uniformly. Thresher was evaluated in terms of threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, germination percentage and seed coat damage of groundnut. The automatic groundnut crop thresher was evaluated under field conditions with optimized parameters viz., threshing cylinder speed of 9 m s-1 with concave clearance of 25 mm and a belt conveyor speed of 1.19 m s-1. The threshing and cleaning efficiencies of the machine were found to be 98.46 and 95.12 per cent, respectively with a total loss of 5.02 per cent. Whereas germination percentage and seed coat damages were 98.21 and 3.42 per cent, respectively. The savings in cost and time were found to be 39.29 and 96.22 per cent, respectively, as compared to the conventional method.