Background: Coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) is a significant cash crop in the humid tropics of India. The quality, variety and types of coconut palm vary from one place to other. Nowadays, the lack of skilled climbers for tree climbing is a serious problem experienced by coconut farmers. The adoption of drone technology in coconut cultivation is considered to enhance the productivity of coconut. The current study aimed to study the biometrics of different varieties of coconut trees to design and develop a drone-based spraying and harvesting system which suits all types of coconut palms. Methods: The major parameters influencing drone spraying and harvesting design are crop, machine and meteorological parameters. The crop parameters for the palms were measured by using standard techniques. The prominent varieties include West coast tall, Coconut - ALR (CN) 1, Coconut - ALR (CN) 3, Chowghat orange dwarf, Chowghat green dwarf, Malaysian yellow dwarf, East coast tall and Chandra Kalpa were selected. The biometric data were observed from the randomly selected healthy coconut trees. Result: The eight major coconut varieties were selected and their biometric data was observed. It was concluded that the observations aided in deciding the design of the drone components as well as the spraying and harvesting mechanism suitable for coconut palms.
Background: Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) palm is an important cash crop in India and third-largest producer of coconut in the world. In general, the skilled workers climb to harvest the coconuts from the tree without any safety device. The coconut trees are very tall and injuries associated with coconut tree climbing, particularly falling from coconut trees is common in coconut plantations. In order to rectify the problem, an appropriate cutting system needs to be developed. Hence the characterizing physical and mechanical properties viz., peduncle thickness, width, shape, size, moisture content, density and also the cutting blade characteristics, were studied. Methods: The observed characteristics were used for the effective design of the cutting module. The cutting blades were selected for the investigation viz, circular saw blade and saw tooth blade. The parameters selected for the investigation are cutting speed (S) at three levels (15.70, 20.94 and 26.17 ms-1), the inclination angle of the blade (q) five levels (30, 45, 60, 75 and 90°), type of the blades (B) (regular tooth and ripped tooth pitch) and thickness of peduncle (T) three levels (30, 40 and 50 mm). Similarly for chain saw, the velocity of cutting speed (S) at three levels (500, 700 and 900 rpm), the inclination angle of blade (q) at three levels (45, 60 and 90°) and thickness of peduncle (T) three levels (30, 40 and 50 mm) were selected for the experiments. Result: The optimization of the selected levels of variables was done to achieve best performance to select the cutting speed, cutting angle and type of blade. The results showed that circular saw blades with irregular tooth pitch have higher cutting efficiency than circular saw blades with regular tooth pitch. It was found that cutting time increases linearly with decreasing cutting speed. It was observed that chainsaw gives better cut quality with minimum cutting time than saw blades.
The development of a sesame thresher for the purpose has clearly an edge over conventional methods of threshing and reduce the drudgery of work to a great extent. Due to the scarcity of daily labours, it is essential to bring in a sesame thresher, which is cost-effective, compact, reduce threshing losses and easy to use for sesame cultivars. The laboratory experiments were conducted with different levels of variables, from that the combination level of 11.0 ms-1 peripheral velocity of threshing cylinder, 15 mm concave clearance, spike tooth type cylinder and 16.8 % (d.b) moisture content of harvested sesame capsule were selected. The selected combination level yielding the maximum threshing efficiency of 99.0 %, maximum cleaning efficiency of 99.4 % and minimum % visible damage to threshed sesame grains of 0.79 %, was optimized for the development of prototype sesame thresher. A prototype sesame thresher consisting of a mainframe, threshing unit, blower and sieve assembly, feed chute, power transmission system and transport wheels was developed with optimized level of variables. The prototype sesame thresher was evaluated for its performance in comparison with the conventional method of sesame threshing. Compared with the manual method of threshing, the prototype sesame thresher resulted in 17, 12, and 1.2 % savings in threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, and % visible damage to threshed sesame grains. The prototype sesame thresher results in 87 % and 83 % saving in time and cost respectively when compared to the conventional method of manual threshing.
Seed sowing is an essential and time-bound process agriculture. The basic objective of the sowing operation is to put the seed in rows at the desired depth and maintain seed to seed spacing, covering the seeds with soil and providing proper compaction over the seed. Early or postponed sowing adversely disturbs the crop yield. Therefore, the sowing of seeds in the optimum level is important to ensure more outcomes and high quality of crops. At present, the maize planting is done manually by broadcasting, dibbling, putting seed behind the plough, and other methods or with the help of animal or tractor-drawn seed drills/planters. Though, these techniques have many problems, such as worse efficiency and reduced quality seed placement. Currently among different sowing methods, dibbler planter delivers more uniform and adaptable seed spacing than other approaches for sowing hybrid seeds. But available dibbler planter has some shortcomings of lower field capacity. By considering the apparent advantage of the dibbler planter mechanism, the power-operated dibbler planter for pulse crop was modified and improved to minimize the problems of the existing dibbler planter. Henceforth, the two-row power-operated dibbler was designed and developed to promote mechanization of maize planting operation among small and marginal farmers.
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