Performance Evaluation of Developed Tractor Operated Groundnut Combine for Harvested Groundnut Crop

Abstract

Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea) is an important oil seed crop in India cultivated in an area of 6.7 million hectares with a production of 7.0 million tonnes annually. The crop can be grown successfully in areas receiving the rainfall ranging from 600 to 1250 mm. Present practice of manual harvesting and threshing consumes huge amount of labour to a magnitude of about 175 to 200 women h ha-1. It is very tedious and time-consuming operation and is being adoptable for small scale farming. Since it is a labour-intensive operation, scarcity of labour is often experienced during the peak harvesting season. Several efficient independent machines are available for harvesting and threshing separately by manual feeding but collecting harvested crop and feeding into thresher is again a labour intensive operation. Moreover, the harvesting requires maximum energy and combining may not be feasible with commonly available tractor. Hence the combine was developed by designing collecting, conveying and threshing systems for harvested groundnut crop. Different crop parameters were studied for during development of combine and lateral conveying efficiency and vertical conveying efficiency was also studied. The highest lateral conveying efficiency of 92.40% was obtained at combination of 1.19 m s-1 peripheral velocity of picker conveyor, forward speed of 1.59 km h-1 and 10 cm spacing of flaps and combination of 100 mm slat spacing, 1200 peg end projection angle, 1.19 ms-1 of peripheral velocity of slat elevator had achieved the maximum conveying efficiency of 92.56%.The effective field capacity was 0.122 ha h-1 with an average fuel consumption of about 4.67 lt h-1 for developed combine. It was also observed that output capacity of the thresher was 21.66kg h-1 and the broken pod loss was 0.15 kg h-1. The threshing capacity was 83.58% and the cleaning efficiency was 81.68% for the developed combine.