Development of Feeding Conveyor in Grain Stationery Thresher

Abstract

This study was conducted at the Faculty of Agriculture, Nile Valley University. It aims to develop the conventional grain thresher by the addition of a conveyor feeding belt to increase productivity and reduce operational costs. The improved thresher with conveyor feeding belt was compared with the conventional feeding. Both systems were evaluated in terms of labors requirement, costing and crops losses. For feeding, measurements were taken in all plots using three replications. Independent T- test with three replications was used for analysis of results. Results indicated that there is a significant difference between the threshing methods, for the required man-hrs./fed, labor-saving SDG/fed and crops losses between the two systems. The labour requirement was 2 man-hr./fed for the developed system compared to 6 man-hr./fed for the conventional one. The cost of labour for feeding was 32 SDG /fed compared to 75 SDG /fed with conventional system constituting 43 % of the harvesting operation cost. The total crop losses for traditional feeding was about 10% at feeding rate of 10 kg/min compared with 6% when using developed thresher with conveyor feeding at 10 kg/min feeding rate. The developed thresher with conveyor feeding is durable, easy to operate and with lower maintenance costs. All components of the machine were fabricated from local materials and total cost for the designed and developed conveyor feeding belt was only 1150 DSG.