Design and Development of Ground Collection System for Neem Fruit
Anant Venktesh Tripathi
Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
B. Suthakar *
Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
A. Surendrakumar
Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
R. Kavitha
Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
K. Raja
Department of Nano Science and Technology, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
India is one of the leading producers of neem in the world. But still, there is no mechanical system available for either harvesting the neem fruits from the tree or collecting the neem fruits from the ground. Also, the manual ground collection of neem fruit is a very laborious and time-consuming operation. The cost of ground collection of neem fruit is higher than its selling price which makes neem plantation uneconomical. The introduction of a collection system for collecting the neem fruit from the ground may represent the technological change that is the key factor for improved competitiveness. The main purpose of this work was to develop ground collection system based on the principle of suction. The design of the machinery was based on a determination of fruit geometry and its physical and engineering properties. The proposed innovation enabled a fully mechanical solution for collecting the fallen neem fruit from the ground, achieving a collection capacity of approximately 10 kg.h-1 with a collection efficiency of over 90%.
Keywords: Engineering properties of neem, ground collection system, neem harvester, pneumatic operated machines, vacuum collector