The development of an improved stripping mechanism for sorghum harvesting

摘要

The stripping mechanism offers much to harvest and partially thresh sorghum with a single mechanism. However, current stripper harvester designs were developed for wheat and barley and are not particularly effective for harvesting grains such as sorghum, which are a staple crop in many parts of the world. Therefore, an experimental rotational grain-stripping rig device was fabricated to study the effect of using redesigned and current commercial stripper fingers to strip sorghum grain from the grainpanicles. The current commercial stripper finger was used as a reference finger against which three redesigned stripper fingers were evaluated at a range of rotational speeds, advance angles and cover vertical adjustment configurations for different sorghum varieties. The results showed that increasing the finger size by a scale factor of 1.5 operating in a 0.54 m diameter drum rotating at 200-300 rpm with finger advance angles between 45° and 60° significantly improved performance by reducing the non-harvested losses of the crop.