Design, Development and Evaluation of Lever type Maize Sheller

Abstract

An investigation was carried out to design, develop and evaluate the performance of manually operated Lever type Maize Sheller (LMS). It consisted of a handle, guiding rod, supporting rod, spring loaded ram, maize cob guiding cylinder, shelling blade, buffer, collection chamber, shutter and frame. Performance of developed LMS was statistically compared with Tubular Maize Sheller (TMS) in terms of throughput capacity, shelling capacity, shelling efficiency, unshelled seeds and damaged seeds percentage at different maize cob length. The overall throughput capacity and shelling capacity was found to be 44.63 kg cobs/h and 33.90 kg seeds/h with LMS which was almost 3 times more as compare to TMS. The overall shelling efficiency of 96.34% and 99.45% was observed with LMS and TMS respectively. The unshelled seeds of 3.66% with LMS and 0.55% with TMS were observed. The seed damage during operation with LMS was around 5%, while it was nil in case of TMS. The total savings on shelling hundred kg seeds with LMS was found as ₹ 202 and ₹ 424 on comparing with TMS and bare hand method of shelling respectively. The performance evaluation and economic analysis reveals that the adoption of developed Lever type Maize Sheller can be economical and technically feasible.