Development and Performance Evaluation of a Manually Operated Cowpea Thresher

Abstract:

Threshing is one of the major problems associated with cowpea production in Nigeria. In spite of the food and nutritional importance of the crop to human diet, its threshing has been and remains a serious problem to the farmers. The techniques for threshing cowpea in most rural areas are still the traditional methods of seed separation which are uneconomical, labourous and time consuming. A manually operated cowpea thresher to stimulate manual threshing has been designed, fabricated and tested. The thresher was fabricated using locally available materials at the engineering workshop of the University of Agriculture, Makurdi. Two varieties of cowpea (B301 and C70) were tested on the thresher for performance evaluation in terms of thresher efficiency and mechanical (visible) damage. The test results revealed that for optimum performance, the thresher should operate at a cylinder speed of between 60-75rpm at a feed rate of 24kg/hr.94%-97% threshing efficiency was achieved for the two varieties of cowpea. The cost of production is N15,686:00

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 62-64)
• Pages: 239-246
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.62-64.239
• Online since: February 2009
• Authors: V.I. Umogbai, A. Shehu
• Keywords: Cowpea, Performance Evaluation, Thresher

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