DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF SUNFLOWER THRESHER -Agricultural Mechanical Project
ABSTRACT:
Sunflower is one of the earliest and widely cultivated crops in India and other parts of the world. India stands second among the largest producer of sunflower in the world. Farmers across India have been following various methods of sunflower cultivation, both traditional and mechanized methods. However, due to high cost of labour and management, many farmers have resorted to mechanized farming. Mechanized farming has indeed given the farmer the advantage of increased quality and production of crops.
One among various steps involved the process called “threshing” where the groundnuts are separated from the plant. Manual process of this step consumes huge number of labour and cost to the farmer thereby reducing his profit. Mechanized threshing in its own way has its own limitation.
This project is focused on improving the mechanized threshing process. The design process began with product context study where a thorough understanding of the product was made by going through literatures and through discussions with the industry experts. Traveling to different villages and having one to one interview with the farmers with a list of questionnaires was the method adopted for data collection. Also interviewing suburban shops and observations made during the visits gave a clear insight of the rural lifestyle and their expectations. Data collection was followed by different design process like Quality Function Deployment and Mind Mapping were implemented during generation of concept designs. Improvised threshing mechanism was observed by yielding cleaner groundnut pods, reducing wastage, and eliminating unwanted materials like plant material, soil, gravels, etc.
