Maize (Zea mays) is one of the most important cereal crops in the world agricultural economy. In India, maize is the third important cereal crop after rice and wheat. Engineering properties of produce play an important role in designing and developing of specific machines and their operations such as sorting, separating and cleaning. The present study was planned to determine the optimum values of the basic engineering properties of PMH-1 variety of maize viz., grain dimensions i.e. length, width and thickness, sphericity, projected area, the weight of thousand grain, bulk density, true density, porosity, and the mechanical properties including angle of repose, coefficient of external friction and coefficient of internal friction at storage moisture content 8 to 18% db using the standard methods. It was found that various properties such as grain length varied between (10.45±0.25 to 10.98±0.32) mm, width (8.95±0.57 to 9.33±0.55) mm, thickness (4.84±0.23 to 5.93±0.77) mm, sphericity (0.73±0.03 to 0.75±0.02), projected area (5.45±0.18 to 6.68±0.23) cm2, thousand grain weight (301.31±6.31 to 348.47±9.51) g, bulk density (761.2±2.13 to 662.81±1.60) kg/m3, true density (1314.75±18.58 to 1229±4.51) kg/m3, porosity (42.12±0.62 to 46.06±0.54) %, angle of repose (20.31±1.05 to 21.66±0.98), coefficient of internal friction (0.39±0.02 to 0.32±0.03) and coefficient of external friction (0.39±0.02 to 0.51±0.04).
Physical properties, sphericity, volume, density, porosity
