Development of a Power Operated Fenugreek Thresher

Abstract

A power operated fenugreek thresher consists of threshing cylinder, concave, feeding chute, blower, sieve assembly, power transmission unit, and mainframe, operated by 2 hp motor was developed to separate the fenugreek seeds from pods and clean the seeds. The threshing cylinder was provided with spike tooth to apply impact force and detach pods from plants and split to obtain seeds from pods. The threshed seed passed through concave and cleaned by a set of sieves and blower. Performance evaluation of the developed thresher was conducted at various cylinder speeds (12, 13.51, and 15.94 m/s), feed rates (40, 50, and 60 kg/h) and number of spikes (35, 40, and 45), for the threshing efficiency and percent broken seed. Employing the hybrid artificial neural network–multi-objective particle swarm optimization (ANN-MOPSO) approach, the operational parameters were optimized to maximize threshing efficiency and minimize percent broken seed. The operational parameters and interactions had significant effect (p < 0.05) on threshing efficiency and percent broken seed. The ANN-MOPSO model yielded cylinder speed of 13.83 m/s, feed rate of 41.51 kg/h, and 40 number of spikes on threshing cylinder as optimum parameters with threshing efficiency of 99.6% and broken seed of 0.08% with validation results showed a variation of − 0.06% and + 12.5%, respectively. The cleaning efficiency and energy consumption of the fenugreek thresher were found to be 99.92% and 1.68 kWh, respectively.