Design and development of a tractor-mounted soybean combine harvester
1994
Thanisorn Nakgoue
Rapid expansion of the other sectors such as industry, construction, and tourism during the past five years has drawn labor forces form agricultural sector resulting in labor shortage during the peak farming seasons, especially planting and harvesting operations. Labor shortages are increasing seriously every year in every major crops. Soybean is one of the crop facing labor shortage crisis, especially during the harvesting and threshing operations, because manual harvesting and threshing of soybean are quite tedious and labor intensive tasks. Therefore, Thai farmers are looking forwards to having appropriated harvesting and threshing machines. Based on those reasons, a 22 Hp tractor-mounted soybean combine harvester in a dimension of 1400 * 5000 * 2200 mm. (Width * Length * Height) was designed and constructed. Accordingly, it comprises of four major units, namely, a header, a conveying, a threshing, and a cleaning units, respectively. After doing some testing and modifications, a prototype of a tractor-mounted soybean combine harvester was developed. This machine improves the timeliness of operation and reduces drudgery and labor requirement for harvesting and threshing operations of soybean. In the field tests, the averaged field capacity of the machine was found to be 0.589 rai/hr (0.094 ha/hr) with an averaged field efficiency of 42.37 percent. The break-even point and the payback period of the utilization of the machine with respected to the manual harvesting and threshing operations were found to be 43.25 rai (6.92 ha) and 3.67 years, respectively. Accordingly, the overall losses were found to be minimum at the reel speed index and cutter bar speed of 1.0 and 0.5 m/s, respectively. At these corresponding reel speed index and cutter bar speed, the averaged blower, screen, shatter, stubble, and stalk losses were found to be 2.31, 1.25, 7.31, 1.64, and 6.49 percent, respectively.
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