The paper describes the design and development of planter for planting onion sets of aggregatum group onions Onion (Allium cepa L.) in close-spacing. The onion set planter developed consisted of onion set planting unit, seed hopper, standard three point hitch for mounting to tractor, main frame, furrow opener, ground wheel, and drive transmission mechanism. The onion set planter was evaluated in the laboratory for its performance. The performance indices namely multiple index, miss index, quality of feed index, precision, mean and standard deviation of onion set planter were 0.05, 0.18, 0.77, 0.27, 11.71 and 5.22 cm’ respectively. The precision of 0.27 was in the acceptable region for indicating the encouraging performance of planter in terms of planting single sets. The tractor operated onion set planter was tested in the field for its performance. The onion sets were graded into four grades. All the four grades of the onion sets were planted by the prototype onion set planter. Plant to plant spacings were 9.34±1.530, 10.35±2.162, 11.50±2.305 and 12.64±2.758 cm for the grades I(2-3 g weight), II(3-4 g weight), III(4-5 g weight) and IV(5-6 g weight) on 12 DAP respectivety. The field capacity of the onion set planter was 0.15 ha./h. The cost of operation was Rs.` 4 150/ha. The cost saved by using onion planter over manual planting was about 30%.
The knowledge of physical and mechanical properties of onion bulb is important for successful design of any planter. Multiplier onion is propagated through bulbs and bulbs are planted manually. Manual planting of onion bulb is highly labour intensive (80-100 man-days ha-1) due to the close plant geometry (plant to plant and row to row spacing is 10 × 15 cm) among the vegetable crops. Engineering properties of multiplier onion were determined in order to design and develop a tractor operated raised bed onion bulb planter. In multiplier onion each onion comprises of 4-5 bulbs. These bulbs were cleaned, separated into single bulbs and divided in to 9 categories manually based on their individual weight viz., <2g, 2-3 g, 3-4 g, 4-5 g, 5-6 g, 6-7 g, 7-8 g, 8-9 g, >9 g. The onion bulb had a moisture content of 80.62±0.87 %. It was observed that the properties varied for different sizes of onion grades and the grades had highly significant effect on most of the properties. The linear dimensions of onion bulbs viz., length, width, thickness for nine grades ranged from 21.21±2.60 to 32.31±3.30 mm, 13.54±1.77 to 30.95±2.91 mm and 10.91±1.40 to 22.63±2.15 mm. The geometric mean diameter, sphericity, shape index and projected area all ranged from 28.22±2.04 to 14.54±0.96 mm, 0.87±0.06 to 0.69±0.08, 1.78±0.32 to 1.22±0.14 and 5.50±0.51 to 1.55±0.30 cm2, respectively. The one hundred onion bulb weight, bulk density, true density were in the range of 1185±19.59 to 121.6±6.30 g, 793.20± 9.45 to 480.19±13.13 kg.m-3, 1086± 205.22 to 1013.6±348.85 kg.m-3, respectively. The angle of repose decreased with increase in size of onion bulbs. The interaction between sphericity, shape index and angle of repose indicated that as the size of the onion size increase angle of repose decreased.
Quality and healthy seedling production is very important for successful vegetable cultivation. Recent days hybrid vegetable seedlings are raised in protrays under protected cultivation to ensure quality seedling production. Vegetable nursery raising is an upcoming successful entrepreneurship area. Growing media filled protrays are dibbled and seeded manually. This process is very tedious, labour intensive, time consuming and drudgery. Keeping this in view, an automatic protray conveying, dibbling and seeding system was designed and developed. The design and construction of automatic protray conveying and dibbling system is presented is this paper. The machine was designed suitable for 98 protray cell (Protray dimension : 530 x 275 mm and protray cavity matrix: 14 x 7 (lengthwise x widthwise) which is widely used for vegetable nursery raising. This system consisted of protray conveyor and indexing system, dibbling unit, penumatic systems, electronic controls and programmable logic controller (PLC). The main conveyor shaft was driven by a stepper motor and the stepper motor was driven by a micro-stepping drive with 3200 pulse/rev configuration. Each protray was detected by a sensor and indexed by determined distance pre-programed of PLC. The function of dibbling unit was to make 10 mm dia. x 10 mm deep depressions at the center of the each cell of the growing media filled protray. The dibbling unit was a set of conically shaped tubular pegs arranged in a common bar. The stroke of the operation was 30 mm and indenting was 10 mm deep. Proximity sensor of PNP type was used for the dead end limits of all motions and conveyor index. The sensors used were dibbling station home sensor, dibbling station lower sensor, main conveyor indexing sensor and tray detection sensor. The entire cycle was controlled by a logic programme and this synchronized the conveyor motion (position/inching) with the dibbling system. This machine was able to index the growing media protrays at the predetermined distance of 38.3 mm and to make uniform depth cavities. The dibbling capacity was found to be 300 protrays/h.
Garlic (Allium sativum L.) is one of the important bulb crops grown and used as a spice in culinary ingredient as it adds to the taste and flavour in a wide range of food preparations. It also has medicinal properties. Garlic is propagated by single clove. Conventionally, garlic cloves are separated by rubbing the bulb between palms, against jute bags or by beating with a wooden stick. These methods are very laborious and time consuming. Hence, a garlic bulb breaker to break and separate cloves from the whole garlic bulb was designed and developed. The garlic bulb breaker consisted of feeding chute, rubber padded rollers (two stages), blower, outlets for cloves and skins, main frame, power and power transmission system. The garlic bulb breaker was evaluated with three types of rubber padding material: plain-plain, button-button and corrugated-corrugated, four clearances between the rollers: 15, 18, 21 and 24 mm and three peripheral speed of rollers: 25.92, 34.56 and 43.2 m/min. Germination experiments were conducted to study the quality of garlic cloves as planting material with the garlic cloves separated by the machine. Highest breaking efficiency of 75% was obtained with corrugated type rubber padding material at an optimum clearance of 18-21 mm clearance between rollers and at 43.2 m/min peripheral speed of rollers. Minimum damage of 0 to 0.7%% and clove loss of 1.08% were observed at optimized parameters. The garlic cloves separated by the developed machine had 100% germination. The breaking capacity of machine was 195 kg/hr. The operating cost of the machine Rs.` 0.3/kg against Rs.` 2.25/kg by manual clove separation.
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