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

Authors : Gholamreza GAHRAMANIAN

Pages : 261-265

View : 19 | Download : 7

Publication Date : 2014-08-01

Article Type : Research Paper

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