JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY
Year:2017 | Volume:7 | Issue:1|Papers Count:24

Introduction: Iran is a frontier of pomegranate fruit production in the world (with almost 40 % of the world's production). However due to traditional processing operations is not ranked as the largest pomegranate exporter. Saveh ,Neyriz and Ferdows are the top pomegranate producing cities in Iran. Pomegranate is consumed as a fresh fruit as well as processed product as food additive, paste, syrup, jelly, pectin, jam, beverage, essence, vinegar and concentrate. Aril extraction is the first and essential postharvest operation for pomegranate processing. Arils are mostly extracted manually even in large scales for fresh and processed consumption. ….

Introduction: Increasing the area of absorber plate between the flowed air through the duct can be accomplished by corrugating the absorber plate or by using the artificial roughness underside of the absorber plate as the commercial methods for enhancing the thermohydraulic performance of the flat plate solar air heaters. Evaluation of this requires the construction of separated solar air heater which is costly and time consuming. The constructed solar flat-plate collector simulator can be a sufficient solution for obtaining the heat transfer and thermodynamic parameters for evaluating the absorber plate. The inclined broken roughness was chosen as the optimum roughness which is surrounded by three aluminum smooth walls. …

Introduction: Recently, employment of rotary tillers has been expanded in gardens and small farms, especially in the northern of Iran. However using the L-shaped blades in the conventional rotary tillers have some problems such as severe vibration problems, weeds stucking around the blades, forming the plow pan and lower performance due to the less powers of such small rototillers. Therefore in order to overcome the above mentioned problems, a rototiller with new ridged blades was designed, fabricated and tested in this research. …

Introduction: Main part of energy consumption in agricultural mechanization is tillage operations therefore optimization of energy consumption in tillage operation is very important. A management method for system to optimize in agriculture is Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) methodology that this method can operate according to criteria of the systems. This method states that, which system has better performance? (for example the system for agricultural tractors, type of implements, methods of tillage, planting and harvesting, and etc). …

Introduction: Olive is one of the most valuable worldwide trees that produces useful products having high nutritional values. It is widely grown in many parts of world. The cost of olives hand picking is estimated to be about two thirds of the total gross return of olive production. Therefore, various types of olive harvesting machineries were developed in the world.

Introduction: Today, attention to safety and environmental issues in all sectors in agriculture, industry and services is very important. Chemical poisons play an important role in rapid progress of agricultural products. Every year about 25 to 35 percent of the world's crops are affected by insects, weeds and plant pathogens disappear and this figure would be raised to 80% if no control was applied.

Introduction: Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) as the second most important world’s sugar source after sugarcane is one of the major industrial crops. The presence of weeds in sugar beet fields, especially at early growth stages, results in a substantial decrease in the crop yield. It is very important to efficiently eliminate weeds at early growing stages .The first step of precision weed control is accurate detection of weeds location in the field. This operation can be performed by machine vision techniques. …

Introduction: Nowadays, many studies were performed about noise source and its type and effects related to duration of sound emission. Most of these researches just report sound pressure level in frequency or time domain. These researches should be continued in order to find better absorber material in noise pollution. Use of fractal geometry is a new method in this filed. Wave fractal dimension value is a strong tool for diagnosis of signal instability and fractal analysis is a good method to finding sound signal characteristics. …

Introduction: Drying foods, fruits and vegetables is a suitable method to reduce post-harvest losses of the crops. Drying is considered as a simultaneous heat and mass transfer process. Various physical, chemical and nutritional changes occur during drying of foods and are affected by a number of internal and external heat and mass transfer parameters. External parameters may include temperature, velocity and relative humidity of the drying medium (air), while internal parameters may include density, permeability, porosity, sorption-desorption characteristics and thermo physical properties of the material being dried. …

Introduction: Many vegetables such as mint are highly seasonal in nature. They are available in plenty at a particular period of time in specific regions that many times result in market glut. Due to perishable nature, huge quantity of vegetables is spoiled within a short period. The post-harvest loss in vegetables has been estimated to be about 30-40 % due to inadequate post-harvest handling, lack of infrastructure, processing, marketing and storage facilities. …

Introduction: Cucumis melo includes a wide range of varieties. The acoustic is production, transmission and energy received form medium vibrations. Acoustic or sonic tests applies for grading productions, ripening determination of fruit firmness and sorting of broken eggs and so on in agriculture. Currently these methods are generalized for measuring non-spherical fruits properties. The primary objective of the present research was to investigate the effect of acoustic system variables such as impact places, impactor material type, pendulum angle and sound level meter position on acoustics response of two different melon varieties, including Zard-Eyvanekey and Sousky-Sabz. These results can be useful for designing acoustic implements related to agricultural products. …

Introduction: In recent years, the determination of firmness as an important quality attribute of apple fruits has been widely noticed. Common methods for firmness measurement are destructive and cannot be applied in sorting lines. Therefore, development of a non-destructive, simple, fast, and the low-cost determination technique of firmness is imperative. Dynamic speckle patterns (DSP) or bio speckle imaging as a new optical technique has been recently noticed for non-destructive quality assessment of food and agricultural products. …

Introduction: Thermal processing has a huge impact on the textural attribute of the final food product and texture is a major factor contributing the overall quality of food. Ohmic heating is an advanced thermal processing method in which heat is internally generated within foods by passing an alternating electric current through them. Ohmic heating can volumetrically heat the entire mass of a food system, resulting in faster heating, better quality and less energy consumption than conventional thermal processing. Gradient voltage and electrode type have high effect on ohmic heating system. …

Introduction: Vibrations include a wide range of engineering sciences and discuss from different aspects. One of the aspects is related to various types of engines vibrations, which are often used as power sources in agriculture. The created vibrations can cause lack of comfort and reduce effective work and have bad influence on the health and safety. One of the important parameters of the diesel engine that has the ability to create vibration and knocking is the type of fuel. In this study, the effects of different blends of biodiesel, bioethanol and diesel on the engine vibration were investigated. As a result, a blend of fuels such as synthetic fuel that creates less vibration engine can be identified and introduced. …

Introduction: Nowadays, due to higher environmental pollution and decreasing fossil fuels many countries make decisions to use renewable fuels and restrict using of fossil fuels. Renewable fuels generally produce from biological sources. Biodiesel is an alternative diesel fuel derived from the transesterification of vegetable oils, animal fats, or waste frying oils. Considering the differences between diesel and biodiesel fuels, engine condition should be modified based on the fuel or fuel blends to achieve optimum performance. …

Introduction: As reported by Sabetghadam (2005), 53.4, 36.3, 1.1, 8.9, and 0.2% of total energy consumption in Iran consisted of oil products, natural gas, coal, electricity energy, and modern energy sources, respectively. The modern energies included solar, biomass, wind and nuclear. The energy mix has been evolving towards clean energies. From 1966-2005, the contribution of natural gas increased from 1.3% to 36.3% and the contribution of electricity was doubled from 4.1% to 8.9%. The share of oil products in domestic consumption has dropped from 84.3% to 53.4%. …

Introduction: Controlling greenhouse microclimate not only influences the growth of plants, but also is critical in the spread of diseases inside the greenhouse. The microclimate parameters were inside air, greenhouse roof and soil temperature, relative humidity and solar radiation intensity. Predicting the microclimate conditions inside a greenhouse and enabling the use of automatic control systems are the two main objectives of greenhouse climate model. …

Introduction: Electrical performance of solar cells decreases with increasing cell temperature, basically because of growth of the internal charge carrier recombination rates, caused by increased carrier concentrations. Hybrid Photovoltaic/thermal (PVT) systems produce electrical and thermal energy simultaneously. PVT solar collectors convert the heat generated in the solar cells to low temperature useful heat energy and so they provide a lower working temperature for solar cells which subsequently leads to a higher electrical efficiency. …

Introduction: Spiral conveyors effectively carry solid masses as free or partly free flow of materials. They create good throughput and they are the perfect solution to solve the problems of transport, due to their simple structure, high efficiency and low maintenance costs. …

Introduction: Lentil (Lens culinaris medic) is an important and highly nutritious crop belonging to the family of legumes. Lentil is cultivated worldwide but competition with weeds is a problem affecting production and can reduce yield by more than 80%. The study on the separation of impurities in bulk lentils (Euphorbia helioscopia weed, Wild oat weed and etc.) by a gravity separator has an extreme importance. Since no study has been done to date, in this study, the effects of different parameters of a gravity separator (longitudinal and latitudinal slopes, oscillation frequency and amplitude) on the separation of foreign matters in lentil seeds were evaluated. A dimensionless number (v/a w) which shows ration of air current velocity blown to lentil to the maximum velocity of table oscillation, was considered in ratio of separation. …

Introduction: Biofuels are considered as one of the largest sources of renewable fuels or replacement of fossil fuels. Combustion of plant-based fuels is the indirect use of solar energy. Biofuels significantly have less pollution than other fossil fuels and can easily generate from residual plant material. Waste and residues of foods and wastewater can also be a good source for biofuel production. …

Introduction: Discovering and understanding customer needs and expectations are considered as important factors on customer satisfaction and play vital role to maintain the current activity among its competitors, proceeding and obtaining customer satisfaction which are critical factors to design a successful production; thus the successful organizations must meet their needs containing the quality of the products or services to customers. …

Introduction: The high energy consumption is one of the serious problems in poultry industry. The poultry industry consume about five percent of total energy sources in different countries, with consideration of losses, it increases up to 16-20%. In the year 2003 also, the Iranian chicken meat consumption per capita was 13.3 kg, while in the year 2013 it increased to 25.9 kg (FAO, 2014). It shows that in the diet of Iranian people, the chicken meat has become a strategic food. Poultry industry is one of the biggest and most developed industries in Iran. …

Introduction: The significant of solar energy as a renewable energy source, clean and without damage to the environment, for the production of electricity and heat is of great importance. Furthermore, due to the oil crisis as well as reducing the cost of home heating by 70%, solar energy in the past two decades has been a favorite of many researchers. Solar collectors are devices for collecting solar radiant energy through which this energy is converted into heat and then heat is transferred to a fluid (usually air or water). …