Conceptual design of a chickpea harvesting header

Interest in the development of stripper headers is growing owing to the excessive losses of combine harvesters and costs of manually harvesting for chickpeas. The design of a new concept can enhance the mechanized process for chickpea harvesting. A modified stripper platform was designed, in which passive fingers with V-shape slots remove the pods from the anchored plant. The floating platform was accompanied by a reel to complete the harvesting header. Black-box modeling was used to redesign the functional operators of the header followed by an investigation of the system behavior. Physical models of the platform and reel were modified to determine the crucial variables of the header arrangement during field trials. The slot width was fixed at 40 mm, finger length at 40 mm, keyhole diameter at 10 mm and entrance width at 6 mm; the batted reel at peripheral diameter of 700 mm and speed at 50 rpm. A tractormounted experimental harvester was built to evaluate the work quality of the stripper header. The performance of the prototype was tested with respect to losses and results confirmed the efficiency of the modified stripper header for chickpea harvesting. Furthermore, the header with a 1.4 m working width produced the spot work rates of 0.42 ha h. Additional key words: black-box modeling; chickpea harvesting; design; losses; stripper header. * Corresponding author: [email protected] Received: 09-11-12. Accepted: 23-07-13. This work has one Supplementary Figure that does not appear in the printed article but that accompanies the paper online. Abbreviations used: MOG (material other than grain); p.t.o. (power take-off). Nomenclature: D (reel diameter, m); n (speed of the reel, rpm); nw (speed of the ground wheel, rpm); T (number of tooth on reel gear); Tw (number of tooth on ground gear); v (forward speed, km h); V (peripheral speed of the reel, km h); Wdp (weight of detached pods on the header, kg); Wpg (weight of detached pods on the ground, kg); Wud (weight of remained pods on the plant, kg); Ï (reel kinematic index, dimensionless). Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA) Spanish Journal of Agricultural Research 2013 11(3): 635-641 Available online at www.inia.es/sjar ISSN: 1695-971-X http://dx.doi.org/10.5424/sjar/2013113-3728 eISSN: 2171-9292