Aeromechanical purification of freshly harvested seed heaps of desert fodder plants

It is stated in the paper that the difficulty in cleaning freshly harvested seed heaps of desert fodder plants and in the creation of cultivation equipment for their sowing is due to specific features of the physical-mechanical properties of seed heaps of desert fodder plants. The high content of weeds (up to 70%) in the composition of freshly harvested seed heaps collected manually or by mechanized methods makes them loose, leading to the impossibility to sow these seeds without preliminary cleaning. A proposed technological process of aeromechanical cleaning of freshly harvested seed heaps of desert fodder plants is as follows. First of all, it is necessary to provide for the enrichment of the heaps by separating the coarse-sized fractions. The enriched heaps of seeds are subjected to stage-by-stage separation. At the first stage, coarse impurities are singled out by a mechanical working body, and at the second stage - separation of seeds and small impurities is conducted by an airflow. A technological process of aeromechanical separation of freshly harvested seed heaps of desert fodder plants was investigated, as a result, the final velocities of particle motion along the working surfaces which have the form of a straight line, a parabola, and a semicircle were determined. The most acceptable form of the working body was identified — a circular semi-ring installed in an aeromechanical separator. The effectiveness of seed cleaning by an aeromechanical separator was determined.