DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A MECHANICAL DATE PALM POLLEN EXTRACTOR
2012
Mostaan ,Ahmad | Torahi ,Aziz
Supply of dry and adequate pollen is accounted as one of the three essential factors for the development of mechanized pollinating of date palm trees. Current method of pollen extraction is based on hand shaking and gathering of male inflorcences of date palm. This traditional method suffers form low efficiency and cannot be used as the commercial method by the growers. Thus the new pollen extraction equipment has been designed and developed in this research to over come the pollen source obstacle in mechanized pollination process. The design is basd on the local technology and is based on the natural behavior of the male flowers. This equipment is consisted of two main parts of flower separating and pollen gathering units. Separating unit includes two parts of flower separating mechanism and flower sieve. Flower separating mechanism is consisted of 64 15cm rotating separating cables which rotate around 2 axes in 1400rpm. In this process most of the pollen contained in the flowers spread in to the separation chamer. The separated flowers then guided to pass on the vibrating sive which oscillates in 25Hz and 2mm amplitude. All of the separated pollen grains are gathered by pollen gathering unit. The results showed that the average extraction time is about 9.5s. Also 32.036gr of pollen is separated from each male spath wich is 38.5% more than the pollen extracted by the conventional method.
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