Mechanical thresher for pepper
The thresher has a capacity of 320 kg per hour.
PEPPER (PIPER nigrum) is a perennial climbing vine, mostly found in southern India.
The spikes of well-matured, unripe berries are manually picked when they are blackish green and most pungent.
Manual trampling effects threshing of pepper berries. The empty spikes are disposed to the compost pit and used as manure.
To overcome the drudgery of manual labour a mechanical thresher has been developed at the Department of Food and Agricultural Process Engineering, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore.
Thresher parts
The thresher consists of a metallic drum provided with rasp bars, concave oscillating sieve, power source and power drive.
On the periphery of the drum, rasp wooden bars are mounted. The drum is placed inside the concave sieve provided with an opening and a suitable cover. A hopper is provided for easy feeding of spikes into the sieve. An oscillating sieve is attached with an eccentric wheel to separate the berries and spikes after threshing.
The power to the drum is transmitted though V pulley arrangement from a 2 hp motor.
The pepper spikes fed through the hopper reach the threshing drum and undergo threshing. The separated berried and empty spikes fall on the sieve and are separated.
The performance of the thresher was evaluated in the plantations for the capacity, breakage and threshing efficiency at various speeds of operation.
The capacity of the thresher is 320 kg/hour and the percentage of broken berries was negligible and the threshing efficiency was found satisfactory.
R. Viswanathan
M. Balakrishnan
& V.V. Sreenarayanan
TNAU, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu
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