Development and Performance Evaluation of Peanut Threshing Machine

Peanut also called groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is an important oilseed and cash crop that is grown in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Nowadays, tractor mounted peanut threshers without grading systems are commonly used to thresh the harvested groundnut plants, which results in the mixing of standard quality groundnut pods with immature/dead pods, mud/clods, and other impurities. To address this challenge, the conventional thresher was incorporated with a grader. The modified thresher was evaluated during the threshing season of 2023-24 in district Rawalpindi, Pothwar region of Punjab, Pakistan. The performance of the newly developed groundnut thresher (TH₁) was compared with conventional thresher (TH₂) based on threshing productivity (capacity) (kg h-1), pod breakage percentage (%), cleaning efficiency (%), and threshing efficiency (%) at three different ranges of moisture contents viz. M₁ = 19-23%, M₂ = 14-17%, M₃ = 8-12%. Experimental data were collected and statistically analyzed at a 5% level of probability. The experimental results revealed that maximum cleaning efficiency in the improved (TH₁) and conventional (TH₂) threshers were 97.88% and 84.92% respectively at the minimum moisture content (8-12%) while the minimum pod damage percentage was observed 2.24% and 4.44% at higher moisture content (19-23%). The overall performance of improved groundnut thresher was more satisfactory than the conventional thresher based on cleaning efficiency and pod damage percentage while it performed equally for threshing productivity and threshing efficiency. From the experimental results, it reveals that the modified groundnut thresher performed better to clean and grade the groundnut pods in one operation.