Designing, fabrication and evaluation of threshing unit edible sunflower

Abstract

The present project focuses on solving the problem faced by the farmers in separating the seeds from the edible sunflower heads so study was conducted to designed, fabricated and evaluated a threshing unit which will separate the seeds from the sunflower heads. The sunflower threshing unit operates on the principle of axial flow movement of the material with diameter drum thresher of 600mm and length thresher of 1200 mm. The performance was evaluated in terms of output threshing efficiency, separation efficiency, percentage of seed losses and damage seed. Evaluation was carried out with Galami Badami variety at different levels of moisture contents; 40%, 30% and 20% (w. b.) and at different peripheral velocities of drum speeds; 17.23, 12.56, 7.85, feed rate; 3000, 2000, 1000  with constant concave clearance of 35mm. The analysis of variance showed that the drum speed (A), feed rate (B) and moisture content (C) affected all parameters of performance significantly at level 1% and moisture content had the most effectz on all results. The evaluation results indicated with decreasing moisture content, threshing efficiencies and separation efficiency increased from 98% to 99.22% and 54.45% to 60.98% also seed losses and damage seed reduced from 1.98% to 0.8% and 0.7 to 0.41% respectively. The maximum amount of threshing efficiencies with changing drum speed and feed rate obtained 98.86% and 98.88% also with decreasing drum speed and feed rate separation efficiency increased from 55.63% to 59.13% and reduced slightly from 57.97 to 57.45 respectively. The seed loss was range to 1.3%, 1.51% and 1.16%, 1.63% with changing drum speed and feed rate.