Design Development and Evaluation of Lever type Maize Sheller

Abstract

An investigation was carried out to design, develop and evaluate the performance of manually operated Lever type Maize Sheller (LMS). It consisted of a handle, guiding rod, supporting rod, spring loaded ram, cob guiding cylinder, shelling blade, buffer, collection chamber, shutter and frame. The performance of LMS was statistically compared with tubular maize sheller (TMS) in terms of throughput capacity, shelling capacity, shelling efficiency, unshelled seeds and damaged seeds. Statistical analysis showed that individual and interaction effect of length of cobs and type of shellers significantly affected the performance parameters at 1% level of significance. The throughput capacity and shelling capacity was found to be 45 kg cobs/h and 35 kg seeds/h whereas it was 68% and 67%, respectively more as compare to TMS. Moreover, shelling efficiency of LMS was found as 96.34% and it was 3.12% less than that of TMS. The unshelled seeds were 3.66% with LMS and 0.55% with TMS. The seed damage during operation with LMS was around 5%, while it was nil in case of TMS. The total savings on shelling hundred kg seeds was found as ₹428 with average hourly net profit of ₹ 150.22 and payback period of 10 hours.