Advances in Research

Threshing of sesame seeds from the harvested capsules is one of the important operations and it consumes more labor, time and cost. Hence the development of a power operated portable sesame thresher is timely essential for the small farmers. The physical properties of sesame seeds namely size of the seed, Number of seeds per capsule, 1000 grain weight and length and thickness of capsules were studied for developing a power operated portable sesame thresher. The most popular variety used in Tamil Nadu is TMV 7. The average length and thickness of capsules were measured as 35 and 12 mm respectively. The average number of seeds in single capsule was determined as 60. The average 1000 grain weight was determined as 3.1 g. and the average size of the seed is 3×1.8× 0.9 mm. Based on these results the portable sesame thresher was fabricated based on double roller (two rollers are rotating with opposite direction) mechanism with an overall size of 1392 ×700 ×1170 mm and its performance was assessed in terms of threshing efficiency, output capacity, saving in cost and time and compared with conventional methods of manual threshing. The developed portable power sesame thresher was field tested and its threshing efficiency and seed output capacity were 96.7% and 18.2 kg h^-1, respectively. The saving in cost and time were 92 and 72% respectively as compared to conventional method of manual threshing.