1Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, IGKVV, Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
2College of Agriculture Engineering, JNKVV, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh.
Threshing is recognized to be a very labour intensive operation and involve considerable human drudgery. Further, delay in threshing operation, results in delay in sowing of the next crop and hence it reduced the yield. Studies on the effect of moisture content, feed rate and cylinder peripheral speed on the performance of thresher were done for different makes of threshers. Two types of commercial threshers were taken for study. The first thresher was operated by 5 hp electric motor (thresher-I) and 10 hp electric motor (thresher-II). The second thresher was operated by 35 hp MF –1035 tractors (thresher-III). It was observed that with the increase in moisture content feed rate and decrease in the cylinder speed there was an increase in total unthreshed grain and decrease in grain damage. The interaction between crop moisture content and cylinder speed was found to be most significant at higher speed. Thresher – I, II and III with optimum output capacities of 3.57 q/h, 4.21 q/h and 17.56 q/h gave threshing and cleaning efficiencies in the range of 93.5 to 99.75 per cent and grain damage in the range of 0.5 to 6 per cent. The total cost of threshing per quintal out put in hand beating, wooden roller with bullock trading, tractor trading, thresher I, thresher II and thresher III was found to be Rs. 32.75, Rs. 55.00, Rs. 28.20, Rs. 13.16, Rs. 12.87 and Rs. 14.13 respectively. The output capacity in above threshing practices was found to be 0.25 q/h, 1.15 q/h, 8.4 q/h, 3.57 q/h, 4.21 q/h and 17.0 q/h respectively.
