Development of Poppy Harvester

The intensification and difficulty of cultivation, maintenance, and harvesting in poppy cultivation limit the poppy cultivation. The processes of disintegration and separation after poppy collected by hand from the field are required labor intensive and time-consumption; this increases the cost as well. It is aimed that the development of poppy harvester prototype which harvest of poppy capsules, disintegrate of capsules, separate seed, capsule and stem that is consider our country's conditions, existing applications and problems therefore the reason as the hard working conditions, the surplus of labor requirements for harvesting, the difficulty of finding workers at harvest period, high labor costs, occupying much of the product in the harvesting, transport conditions from the field, low harvest yield. The study consists of design and manufacturing stages. The prototype machine consists of mainframe, reel, cutter bar, transmission unit, threshing unit and separation unit. The mainframe is the structure that the machines are assembled on. The machine mainframe has 4 wheels. The reel tilts the poppy stalks to the knife mouth and transfers to the conveyor. The reel is driven by a hydraulic motor which also allows the setting of the speed. In the prototype machine, triangular knife type with 150 cm work width and sharp edges with threaded construction was used. The cutter bar can be adjusted to a mean speed of 600 min-1 to provide a mean knife speed of 1.69 m/s. Belt type conveyors have been used for conveying to the threshing unit of the product laid by the reel and harvested by the cutter bar. The conveyor has been manufactured in two stages so as to transport the harvested product horizontally just behind the cutter bar, then to raise it to the feed mouth of the threshing unit. The conveyor can be adjusted by a hydraulic motor to provide an average conveying speed of 2 m/s. The threshing unit which has a pair of 300 mm dia. and 900 mm length grooved surfaced roller was designed for breaking into pieces of the poppy capsules. There are grooves with a depth of 2.5 mm inclined by 45° to facilitate gripping the capsules by the rollers. One of the rollers is driven by the PTO, turning at 100 min-1 and the other at 200 min-1. There are three sieves in the separation unit. The upper sieve transfers the parts of the stalk to the field and the capsules parts and seeds to the middle sieve. The middle sieve holds the capsule parts. The lower sieve holds the seeds and transfers the dust to bottom. Sieve inclination is 5o, sieve acceleration is 11 m/s2 and the