Performance Evaluation of Multi-crop Thresher for Threshing Radish (Raphanus Sativus)

Vegetables are integral and important part of human diet. Availability of vegetables per person in India has been dropping and prices are sky-rocketing. Among vegetables, radish is also one of the most important vegetable for human diet. Main hurdle in promotion and adoption of these vegetables by farmers is non-availability of good quality seed. Seed production in vegetables is restrained due to lack of mechanization. In India, radish seed is threshed manually by beating with sticks. Manual process is tedious and laborious. Multicrop spike tooth thresher can serve the purpose of threshing different crops by making some minor adjustments in the machine. The present study was aimed at optimizing operational and crop parameters influencing threshing of Radish Seed (Raphanus Sativus). The moisture content of crop and grain varied from 4 to 7% and 8 to 15% on wet basis respectively. Fifteen spikes were arranged helically on cylinder by arranging alternatively two and three spikes per row. Concave clearance was kept as 25mm. Peripheral speed (PS) of cylinder and crop feed rate (F) were independent parameters whereas grain damage, cleaning efficiency and threshing efficiency were dependent parameters. Peripheral speed of 18.2 m/s and feed rate of 276 kg/hr resulted in optimum threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, grain damage and non-collectable losses of 99.51, 99.18, 0.49 and 0.46 percent respectively