Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF AXIAL FLOW PADDY THRESHER EQUIPPED WITH MODIFIED CONVEYOR BELT TYPE MECHANICAL FEEDING SYSTEM

Manish Ahuja, Baldev Dogra, M.K. Narang and Ritu Dogra

Abstract

The capacity of wheat threshers increased multifold when equipped with mechanical feeding system. In order to increase the capacity of paddy thresher, a conveyor belt type feeding system for axial flow paddy thresher was developed. There were some limitations in this system. To improvise these limitations, thresher with improvised conveyor belt type mechanical feeding system has been developed. In continuation to these efforts, this study was attempted to evaluate performance of this thresher. The performance evaluation of this thresher was conducted at the Departmental farm during Nov-Dec, 2015. In the initial attempt, preliminary evaluation of the thresher was carried out to locate the feasible points for threshing viz. conveyor speed, suitable rpm of threshing cylinder and feed rate etc. After preliminary testing of conveyor belt type thresher, its performance evaluation was studied on PR-124 to ascertain the effect of cylinder speed (12.01, 14.13 and 16.24 m/s), conveyor speed (2.71, 3.19 and 3.66 m/s) and feed rate (5.10, 6.00 and 6.90 t/h). The threshing efficiency, non-collectable loss, broken grain, cleaning efficiency, sieve overflow and torque were 99.08%, 0.516%, 0.338%, 97.96%, 0.401% and 354.80 Nm respectively at the best combination of cylinder speed, feed rate and conveyor speed of 16.24 m/s, 6.90 t/h and 2.71 m/s respectively.