Design and development of a cutter and feeder mechanism for a chick pea harvester

Chickpea plants grown in Iran are short and mostly cultivated on rough dry lands. Although it is difficult to use a conventional grain combine to harvest it, chickpea production is limited due to harvesting problems, such as uneven ripening, lodging and shattering losses of hand harvesting. A special tiller mounted harvesting machine was designed and developed. The cutter and feeder mechanism simultaneously performs the tasks of (1) pick up the lodged plant material, (2) guiding the plant to the machine, (3) cutting the material stalk with changeable cutting height and (4) conveying and collecting shoots without threshing. The header consists of a V-shape guide that use three inclined sprockets and a chain on each side, two feeder belts, four identical pulleys and a new cutter bar that cuts the stalks without impact. Bending stress and modulus of elasticity and coefficient of friction of stalk for three varieties, Arman, Hashem and Flips were measured to determine machine design parameters.