Performance Evaluation of Tractor Operated Groundnut Thresher

Abstract

The production of groundnut in India is being rapidly increased in the last ten years and is expected to increase further in coming decade. Farmer mostly used traditional cultivation practices for production of groundnut, which are labour and time intensive. Therefore, time saving machineries suited to labours should be used by growers to handle harvest and post-harvest operations for this crop. The performance evaluation of the thresher for groundnut crop was conducted with 50 hp tractor. The experiment was carried out at the Cotton Research Centre and Instructional Farm of College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, Junagadh Agricultural University, Junagadh for kharif groundnut for Virginia Bunch type varieties of GG-20 and GG-22, respectively. The pod output capacity was observed as 524.66 kg/h (cylinder speed ~ 292 rpm) and 407.60 kg/h (cylinder speed ~ 421 rpm) for GG-22 and GG-20 varieties, respectively. The percentage of blown pods, un threshed pods, broken pods and spilled pods were observed as 14.51, 18.92, 0.126, 1.04% and 6.07, 14.59, 0.361, 0.99% for GG-22 and GG-20 varieties, respectively. The average threshing and cleaning efficiency were found as 81.08, 88.21 and 85.41, 88.74% for GG-22 and GG-20 varieties, respectively. The overall average cost of threshing operation was observed Rs.729.42 per hour and Rs.156 per quintal for both the varieties.