Design and manufacture of safflower petal harvester machine

Department of Agrotechnology, College of Abuoreihan, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

^a Corresponding author: Sia.azimi@ut.ac.ir

Received: 18 May 2012
Accepted: 21 September 2012

Abstract

Safflower is an oil-seed crop with high quality oil that is used for producing healthy foods and painting colors. This crop has valuable petals which have a lot of uses in medicine, production of food colors and dyes for coloring fabrics, but such problem as dispersion of flowers, thorns of crops that hurt worker’s hands also lack of a suitable harvesting machine have enforced farmers to harvest petals by hand that is a hard work and non-economic. In this study a prototype machine was designed and constructed. This machine includes an engine, a radial fan with BI blades, a snout, a diffuser to separate petals from airflow and a store; all parts are assembled on a trolley to move easily in farm. This machine picks safflower petals out and intakes through snout by the fan suction power. Petals go to diffuser where they are separated from airflow then fall to the store. Velocity of airflow in the snout was determined by a fan test duct in order to design diffuser. At last three farms were harvested by this machine for economic analysis. Results show 657% increasing in amount of harvested petals by harvester machine in comparison with hand harvesting.