GROUNDNUT occupies 46 per cent of the total cultivated area in the state. Due to lack of suitable and simple mechanical devices, the separation of pods is done mainly through manual labour, which is time consuming, labour intensive and reduces the profit. Manual and power operated mechines have been developed and evaluated for threshing groundnut (Chowdegowda and Ranganath, 1978 ; Guruswamy and Narvani, 1980 ; Sharma et al., 1986 and Asokan and Shanmugam, 1993). However, these machines were found tobe costly, (Prasannakumar et al., 1995) require high power and some machines like pod plucking machine developed by Guruswamy and Narvani, 1980, needs the crop with pods to be arranged in one side for feeding and plucking. Keeping the above factors in view, a study was undertaken to develop and evaluate the performance of the axial flow thresher.
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