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

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 (15°, 20° and 25°) and fingers distance (7 mm and 10 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<1%) and incremental. However, the effect of the fingers angle (A) was greater on LF losses and the effect of the fingers distance (S) was higher on Lp losses. The lowest amounts in total losses (LT) (P< 0.05) were 57.4% and 24.7% in layouts of headers of number 1 (S =7mm and A=15°) and number 2 (S =7mm and A=20°), respectively. 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 (15°, 20° and 25°) and fingers distance (7 mm and 10 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<1%) and incremental. However, the effect of the fingers angle (A) was greater on LF losses and the effect of the fingers distance (S) was higher on Lp losses. The lowest amounts in total losses (LT) (P< 0.05) were 57.4% and 24.7% in layouts of headers of number 1 (S =7mm and A=15°) and number 2 (S =7mm and A=20°), respectively.