Design, Manufacture and Performance Evaluation of a Soybean Paddle Thresher with a Blower

Philip Yamba

doi:10.11648/j.ijmea.20170505.13

Abstract

Soybeans threshing is traditionally done by hand beating with a wooden stick on a hard surface which is a drudgeries operation which leads to time-consuming, grain damage and grain loss due to shattering for small-scale farmers. Therefore, a soybeans manual thresher (Pedal operated) machine attached to a blower was designed, manufactured and its performance evaluated to help eradicate this problem by reducing labor, improve post-harvest, and increase income to small-scale farmers. The thresher consists of a hopper, drum, shaft on bearings, frame, beaters, blower, chain, and sprocket power transmission, pedal and seat. The thresher was fabricated with sheets and angle iron and the mechanism is based on a combination of impact, compression, and shear. Two levels of moisture content level were combined to evaluate the performance of thresher in terms of its capacity, threshing efficiency and percentage grain damage. The combination of dried and wet sample mixture at a feed rate of 25kg yielded maximum threshing capacity of 96 kg/hr, 98.6% maximum threshing efficiency and minimum percent grain damage of 3.5% results was recorded, which was very satisfactory.

Highlights

Soybean is certainly of a great economic and social importance worldwide
The performance of the thresher was evaluated at the various machine spindle speed, soybeans/stalks moisture content levels with an average feed rate of 25 kg/h
The throughput capacity should increase with an increase in machine shaft speed at the same repeated conditions, the results show otherwise. This was due to the manual design arrangements and spacing of the beaters to optimize the threshing efficiency at a moderate speed as results shown in figure 3

Summary

Introduction

Soybean is certainly of a great economic and social importance worldwide. Soybean provides about 64 percent of the world’s oilseed meal supply and is the major source of oil, accounting for about 28 percent of total production [1, 2]. Soybeans were introduced in Northern Ghana in 1910 and production rate in Ghana is above 50,000 metric tons per annum [3, 4]. Products such as Soy oil, soya mince, stock feeds, soy cake, soy milk cheese as well as soya wax are some of the products derived from soybean [2]. Soybeans seed contains about 20% oil and 34-36% protein which makes it an economically important seed [5] It is grown for processing into edible oil and the residue from oil extraction is a high protein meal, a critical ingredient for stock feeds. Though many proteins can be obtained from others crops soybean is the only available crop that provides an inexpensive and highquality source of protein comparable to meat, poultry, and eggs

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Conclusion