Modern machinery in post-harvest grain handling technologies

Abstract

Grain cleaning machines previously manufactured for standard units had a number of technological and design disadvantages which were mainly due to significant disparity between the technological capabilities of individual working bodies and transport and technological equipment. As a result, many working bodies and transport equipment of the production line operated with significant underloading which significantly reduced the economic efficiency of continuous grain processing. Therefore, it is an urgent task to develop new, more efficient working bodies that would match the performance of a particular technological operation. Numerous studies have shown the promise of centrifugal-sieve separation. Separators were developed based on this method to ensure operation in various technological processes. Using the possibilities of a new method of separation, a technology for cleaning bread grain is proposed. Understandably, the modernization of the technological lines of post-harvest grain handling cannot be achieved in a short time, and this can be done over a long period of time. Therefore, the authors propose a step-by-step development of technologies for post-harvest grain handling. The expediency of using centrifugal-sieve and air separators at the second and third stages of technological line modernization is substantiated. The parameters of the loading device were substantiated for high-performance centrifugal-sieve separators. Such separators should have a loading neck with a capacity of at least 50 t h. The relationship of the diameter of the loading neck and the axial velocity of the grain is shown. The above technological line has a complete grain cleaning process, and the use of new promising machines allows for high-quality cleaning with a single pass through the production line. The calculations of the loading device have shown that if its throughput is not increased, then any sense of increasing the capacity of cylindrical sieves is lost.