JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY
Year:2016 | Volume:5 | Issue:2|Papers Count:24

Introduction: Iran is one of the major producers of almonds. According to the statistics released by FAO (2011), Iran with more than 110000 tons of almonds is the third in rank throughout the world. However, most Iranian almonds are presented as an unsorted and unpackaged product. Some producers sort their products by hand which is very time consuming and labor-intensive. So, there is an essential need for suitable grading and packaging machines especially for the export of almond kernels. Grading, which is sometimes called sorting, is basically separating the material in different homogenous groups according to its specific characteristics like size, shape, color and on the basis of quality. …

Introduction: From an economic viewpoint, tomato is considered as the second most valuable crop after potato. It is also preceded by the potato in terms of per capita consumption in the world. In 2008, the cultivation area used for the tomato as equal to 163,539 hectares in Iran and the production of it was equal to 5,887,715 tons with an average production of 117,887 tons in 4352 hectares in the provinces, respectively. Having high production volume and quality, costly hybrid seeds are currently used for the major planting areas of vegetable in Iran. …

Introduction: In conventional farming, the soil and crop are considered uniform in different locations of the farm and the fertilizers are applied according to the average of soil needs with an additional percentage for safety (Loghavi, 2003) .Non-essential chemical fertilizers in the field have harmful effects and social, economic and environmental concerns will increase. Many fertilizers go into the surface waters and ground waters and cause poisoning and environmental pollution without being absorbed by the plants. …

Introduction: Grading agricultural products always has a particular important position for submission to domestic and overseas markets. The grading causes more profitable product ranges and customer satisfaction. Grading treatment is carried out based on various parameters such as color, ripeness level, dimensions and weight. Product weight is one of the most effective parameters in grading operation. Egg weight is directly related to the smallness and coarseness of eggs. In egg grading, the largeness value is very important in marketing. This research aimed to design, fabricate and evaluate the egg weighing system based on its dielectric properties. …

Introduction: Barley is one of the most important grains with high digestible starch making it a main source of energy in human nutrition as well as in livestock rations formulation and feeding. Starch is the main part of barley grain and it has an inverse relation with its protein. It has a digestible foodstuff of 80 to 84 percent of its dry matter content. Barley as livestock foodstuff should be processed and it is done in several ways. A customary method for processing barley in dairy farms is its size reduction by milling (Hunt, 1996). …

Introduction: Pistachio nut is one of the most delicious and nutritious nuts in the world and it is being used as a salted and roasted product or as an ingredient in snacks, ice cream, desserts, etc. (Maghsudi, 2010; Kashaninejad et al. 2006). Roasting is one of the most important food processes which provides useful attributes to the product. One of the objectives of nut roasting is to alter and significantly enhance the flavor, texture, color and appearance of the product (Ozdemir, 2001). In recent years, spectral imaging techniques (i.e. hyperspectral and multispectral imaging) have emerged as powerful tools for safequality inspection of various agricultural commodities (Gowen et al., 2007). The objectives of this study were to apply reflectance hyperspectral imaging for non-destructive determination of moisture content and hardness of pistachio kernels roasted in different conditions. …

Introduction: Fast and accurate determination of geometrical properties of agricultural products has many applications in agricultural operations like planting, cultivating, harvesting and post-harvesting. Calculations related to storing, shipping and storage-coating materials as well as peeling time and surface-microbial concentrations are some applications of estimating product volume and surface area. Sphericity is also a parameter by which the shape differences between fruits, vegetables, grains and seeds can be quantified. This parameter is important in grading systems and inspecting rolling capability of agricultural products. Bayram presented a new dimensional method and equation to calculate the sphericity of certain shapesand some granular food materials (Bayram, 2005). …

Introduction: Apple is one of the most important horticultural crops of Iran. Its production in the country stands in the second place after citrus. Iran holds the fourth place in the world production of apples and gains a major share in the export of this product. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance the quantity and quality of the fruit in order to maintain and promote its position among the countries importing this product from Iran. Most of the mechanical damages to fruits and vegetables occur due to contact stresses under static, quasi-static and impact loading. To obtain stress distribution inside the fruit we can use finite element analysis. ...

Introduction: Tractors are considered as the main power generators in mechanized agriculture. Hence, the experts and engineers in tractor manufacturing of the country, are required to focus on developing and designing new features in tractor manufacturing. This must be, of course, paralleled with the economic aspects. Achieving this goal, Iran Tractor Manufactories Co., (ITMCO) has designed and developed tractors equipped with turbochargers. ...

Introduction: In recent years, production techniques and equipment have been developed for conservation tillage systems that have been adopted by many farmers. With proper management, overall yield averages for conventional and reduced tillage systems are nearly identical. Sometimes, field operations can be combined by connecting two or more implements. Much research has focused on either reducing or eliminating tillage operations to develop sustainable crop production methods. The greatest costs in farm operations are associated with tillage due to greater specific energy requirement in tillage and the high fuel costs. Combined operations reduce both fuel consumption and time and labor requirements by eliminating at least one individual trip over the field. …

Introduction: Today, all kinds of vehicle engines work with fossil fuels. The limited fossil fuel resources and the negative effects of their consumption on the environment have led researchers to focus on clean, renewable and sustainable energy systems. In all of the fuels being considered as an alternative for gasoline, methanol is one of the more promising ones and it has experienced major research and development. Methanol can be obtained from many sources, both fossil and renewable; these include coal, natural gas, food industry and municipal waste, wood and agricultural waste. …

Introduction: Tire tractive parameters of the driving wheel are of the most substantial factors for the evaluation of the performance of agricultural tractors. Great tractive efficiency has called the attention of vehicle designers to attain economic efficiency owing to the minimization of fuel consumption. At terrain-tire interface, some soil physicalmechanical changes occur that lead to unwanted soil compaction. Of the influential parameters for the creation of soil compaction is the soil stresses formed owing to the wheeled vehicle trafficking. …

Introduction: Mulch tillage system is an intermediate system which covers some of disadvantages of no tillage and conventional tillage systems. In farms in which tillage is done with a chisel plow, runoff and soil erosion have a less important relation to moldboard and disk plow and naturally absorption of rainfall will be developed. Thus, the mulch tillage system is an appropriate alternative to conventional tillage and no tillage (Backingham and Pauli, 1993). The unwanted vibration in machinery and industry mainly processes most harmful factors, for example: bearing wear ,cracking and loosening joints. ...

Introduction: In recent years, production techniques and equipment have been developed for conservation of tillage systems that have been adopted by many farmers. With proper management, overall yield averages for conventional and reduced tillage systems are nearly identical. Sometimes, field operations can be combined by connecting two or more implements. Combined operations reduce both fuel consumption, and time and labor requirements by eliminating at least one individual trip over the field. …

Introduction: Nowadays the number of motor vehicles in large and small cities is growing. Increasing the number of motor vehicles leads to serious increase of the amount of environmental pollution and daily fuel consumption. Motor vehicle emissions that are known as the most air polluting emissions cause 50-90 percent of air pollution. With large increasd in the number of motor vehicles and their emissions todays, many researchers have investigated engine optimization in order to reduce emissions of motor vehicles. …

Introduction: In order to improve the use of pesticides and pesticide consumption and prevent environmental pollution, manufactures and scientists have considered two major trends. The first major trend is improving techniques that are practical and effective use of small quantities of chemicals to reduce the negative effect of residues of pesticides. The use of new methods usually requires investment and cost. The second major trend is changing the parts that are more important to reform the sprayer components in order to reduce pollution, mainly by including engineering controls, and design and construction of appropriate nozzles. …

Introduction: Nowadays, the tractor mounted boom sprayer is used in many agricultural fields. These sprayers have many advantages compared to other sprayers, but in Iran, their field efficiency is much lower than that of the developed countries, because the tank volume and consumption of pesticides per hectare is often so high that spraying per hectare takesa long time for handling the solutions and transporting the sprayers. Also spray droplet size is ordinarily high and its distribution is unknot uniform. So, often spraying and dropping top parts of plants on the earth is inevitable. ...

Introduction: Encountering soil from the viewpoint of management and product manufacturing has always been considered important, and an attempt is always made hat the tools and contrasting methods of soil be designed in such a way that itself prevents, as much as possible, the destructive consequences or energy waste that include economical or environmental limitations. Enhancing the soil encountering methods, quality reformation, and its related equipment, requires performing reliable tests in actual soil conditions. Considering the complexity and variety of variables in soil and machine contrast, this is a hard task. ...

Introduction: Golestan province is one of Northern provinces in Iran. The area under cultivation of agricultural products in this province is 724.697 hectares, of which about 694.618 hectares are used for farm products (AJMDC, 2011). Cotton as one of oilseed is a potential feedstock for biodiesel production (Ahmad et al., 2011). In the study of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for cotton production in Alborz province, results showed that the total energy input was 31.237 MJ ha-1.

Introduction: The performance of agricultural machines depends on the reliability of the equipment used, the maintenance efficiency, the operation process, the technical expertise of workers, etc. As the size and complexity of agricultural equipment continue to increase, the implications of equipment failure become even more critical. Machine failure probability is (1-R) and R is machine reliability, and that 0<R<1 (Vafaei et al., 2010). Moreover, system reliability is the probability that an item will perform a required function without failure under stated conditions for a stated period of time (Billinton and Allan, 1992).

Introduction: Different models of tractors have been imported from foreign countries or assembled in Iran for many years. Consistency of foreign manufactured products with native specifications and the improvement of locally manufactured tractors are important problems that must be considered. Moreover, tractor dimensions, sitting space and some other important factors such as the ability of Iranian users to operate them must be taken into consideration. In this study, we surveyed the proper proportion of tractors dimension, location of control tools and driver’s work space, with Iranian users’ anthropometric data of drivers from five provinces. Human factors are of paramount importance in developing farm machinery given that these machines will often be operated by persons with minimum skills. ...

Introduction: The common method used for juice pasteurization is the thermal method since thermal methods contribute highly to inactivating microbes. However, applying high temperatures would lead to inefficient effects on nutrition and food value. Such effects may include vitamin loss, nutritional flavor loss, non-enzyme browning, and protein reshaping (Kuldiloke, 2002). In order to decrease the adverse effects of the thermal pasteurization method, other methods capable of inactivation of microorganisms can be applied. …

Introduction: There are several sources of noise in an industrial and agriculture environment. Machines with rotating or reciprocating engines are sound-producing sources. Also, the audio signal can be analyzed to discover how well a machine operates. Diesel engines complex noise SPL and sound frequency content both strongly depend on fuel combustion, which produces the so-called combustion noise. …

Introduction: Drying process of agricultural products, fruits and vegetables are highly energy demanding and hence are the most expensive postharvest operation. Nowadays, the application of control systems in different area of science and engineering plays a key role and is considered as the important and inseparable parts of any industrial process. The review of literature indicates that enormous efforts have been done for the intelligent control of solar driers and in this regard some simulation models are used through computer programming. …