Evaluation of Semi-Mechanized Cotton Harvester machine

The cotton picker harvesting machines are expose to the limitations as follows: Inappropriate space between the planting rows harvester head, utilizing the deciduous before harvesting; high prices, being of imported cotton harvesting machine and exit the currency of the country; the small size of the most farms and the cultivation of non-linear and non-acceptance negligible loss machinery by the farmers. Therefore, it is necessary to design and developed a cotton-harvesting machine that it can apply under the afore-mentioned limitations. For this purpose, a self-portable machine with three-wheel designed. It has a special harvester unit. Picker unit have made with the number of bars such as the finger. It can rotate by an electrical motor. This unit moves by the worker between the bushes and pick the cottons. Cottons can be picked by harvester unit and then transmit them to the reservoir via transmission tubes, with the two mechanisms, suction and blow. The gathered cottons inside the big gunnydischarge at the end of the farm. The objective of this study was design, construction and evaluation of a semimechanized cotton picker-harvesting machine. In the evaluation of this machine, compared to the traditional cotton harvesting (manually). This machine designed first by the SOLIDWORKS software, and then made. To evaluate of this machine and its comparison with the manual method, the two varieties of cotton, Golestan and Khorshid harvested in four rows at the length of 36 m, with three replications. The evaluated properties were field capacity, field losses, impurityamount and fiber length. The experimental design carried out based on the randomized complete block design with the two factors, harvesting method at the two levels (manually as control and semi-mechanized machine) and variety at the levels, Golestan and Khorshid. The test results and evaluate showed that the field capacity of cotton harvesting of this machine was 18/7% more than the handpicked. Moreover; the fiber quality not only does not reduce, but also in some cases, such as the fiber length increased and showed significantly at 5%level with this machine, when compared to manual harvesting method. Increase at about 3 percent in purity and significant increase in the fiber length at 5 percent level was the other result of this machine.