Determination the Effect of a Vacuum Cleaning System on the Quality of Wheat Harvesting in Combines

Year 2014, Volume: 10 Issue: 4, 261 - 265, 01.08.2014

Gholamreza Gahramanıan

Abstract

Conventional combines have a set of straw walkers for separation of the grain from

the straw because the crop passes the concave very quickly and a lot of threshed grains are

therefore still contained in the straw. All combines contain a cleaner in which chaff, immature

grains and small straw particles are separated from the grains. After cleaning system, seeds are

conveyed to tank and then the chaff and straw are thrown a way from the combines. In eastern

countries, straw is very valuable material and for this reason farmers would like to gather them

along with the seeds during wheat harvesting. In order to collect the straw, a major modification

should be made on conventional combines and this is a costly operation. The objective of this

resarch was to design a vacuum type cleaning system for both separation of the grain from the

straw and for collecting the straw. For this reason, a traditional combine was modified with vacuum

cleaning system and was compared with conventional combines for wheat harvesting in Azerbeijan.

The experiment was conducted with three combines; two different conventional combines and one

modified combine at two different revolutions of thresher, 650 and 750 rpm. According to the

results; vacuum type cleaning system was found statistically successful for both separation of the

grain from the straw and for collecting the straw. Although this new cleaning system allows

collecting the straw, the field capacity was found to be low as compared to the traditional

combines. The field capacites were found to be 0.90, 0.96 and 0.30 ha h-1 for traditional combines

and the modified combine, respectively. It should be stated here that the modified combine is the

prefferred one by the farmer since obtaining the straw costs less eventhough the field capacity is

one third on the conventional ones.

Keywords

Wheat harvest, combine, thresher

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