PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF AIR SCREEN SEED GRADER (AGROSAW) FOR SORTING WHEAT GRAINS

Abstract

Seed cleaning and grading lead to safe storage and pure production, which can be done by an efficient seed grader. Also, evaluating the performance of seed graders is important to ensure producing sound seed. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of an air screen seed grader (AGROSAW) Ultra, using wheat seed genotype (Buhooth 22) (Triticum aestivnm L.). Where, the performance was tested using two factors: First, the sieves oscillation with three levels (329, 390 and 440 Hz). Second, seed impurities with three percentages (15%, 10% and 5%), and three replicates for each experimental unit. Furthermore, the impact of the above factors on the parameters was studied, which was the purity and particle size distribution of the seed; also, productivity, specific productivity, the power consumption, and the specific power consumption of the machine.

The result showed that the impurity factor achieved the highest significant difference with some parameters where, seed purity, achieved 97.18%. While the impurity factor did not achieve any significant difference with machine productivity, power consumption and separation efficiency. In addition, the frequency factor achieved the highest significant difference within seed purity, the particle size distribution, the consumed power, the specific power was 6.8 (kW.h.kg^-1), and the specific productivity was 168.8 (kg.kW.h^-1), when no significant difference was recorded for frequency in productivity. Through the results, the percentage of impurities and sieves oscillation influenced most of the parameters studied when examining the performance, concluding that there was observed with the sound seed a presence of impurities.