Design, construction and evaluation of a chickpea harvesting header with fingers and evaluation the effects of header parameters on the losses

Authors
Vahid Rostampour
Asad Modares Motlagh
Abstract
The manual harvesting of chickpea is costly and tedious. Therefore, in this study a chickpea harvesting header was designed, constructed, and evaluated. This header has long stripper fingers and with forward movement of header, pods continuously jammed between the fingers and were separated from bushes. The following four points were considered in designing of header: geometry of fingers, angle of fingers to the horizontal surface (A), fingers length (L) and distance between fingers (S). In field evaluations, the effect of fingers angle (??°, ??° and ??°) and fingers distance (? mm and ?? mm) on losses due to remained pods on bushes (Lp) and losses due to spilled pods on the ground (Lf) were evaluated. Furthermore, by measuring total losses (LT = Lf + Lp) in different configuration of header, the best combination of fingers’ angle and fingers’ distance was determined. The results demonstrated that, the effect of increasing the fingers angle and fingers distance on both types of Lp losses and LF losses was significant (P

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