Structural and Performance Evaluation of a Pollen-duster, Designed for Date Farms
Journal Title: Journal of Agricultural Machinery - Year 2019, Vol 9, Issue 2
Abstract
Introduction Pollinating elevated date palms has been a challenging problem for many years. A few types of equipment have been designed and manufactured in the last fifty years, using either low pressure or compressed air to overcome this problem. However traditional pollination is still the most popular method in none-mechanized and small date farms. In the present research, a light portable electrical pollen-duster has been developed and tested. Materials and Methods A powerful ducted fan, equipped with a speed controller and a servo tester was made and installed on the top of a 6 -7.7m long carbon fiber boom, to provide a high volume rate of air flow for pollination. A small part of air flow is conducted through a by-pass tube to hit the pollen/pollen-flour blend in the pollen bin and suspend it. The rest of air flow, passing through a venturi, is responsible to provide a relative vacuum at the opening of pollen bin to pull up the suspended pollen and throw it toward the date palm crown. Although plain flour is traditionally used as filler in mechanical pollinators, however, SEM imaging showed that pasta flour particles are bigger than plain flour particles and are closer in size to pollen particles. Also, Repose angle of date pollen was measured as 38º where plain flour and pasta flour showed 44.9º and 40.7º respectively (figures 6 and 7). So, Pasta flour was used instead of plain flour to make a blend. To provide a low-weight pollen-duster, wires extending from ducted fan to its actuating equipment (battery, servo tester, and speed controller) were selected to be a combination of 2.5mm2 (3 meters) and 1.5mm2 (3 meters) types in the standard boom. This lowered the applied force on the operatorâs hand by 33% (Figure 5 and equations 4 and 5). Evaluation of the pollen-duster has been performed in Khoor town in Isfahan province of Iran. Eighteen trees of Kabkab variety were pollinated in a completely random test with 6 treatments (five mechanical treatments compared with traditional treatment). Mechanical treatments were using 0.5, 1.5 and 2.5g pure pollen and 2 and 6g pollen-flour blend (in 1:3 ratio) in each of the three weekly repetitions. After 8 weeks, in kimri stage, normal, abnormal (non- pollinated), and dropped fruits on some randomly selected strands were counted to determine pollination as well as fruit setting efficiencies. Fruits weight in each treatment was measured on some random fruits in the Tamar stage. A new index; called "pollen consumption index", was introduced to provide a measure of pollen consumption rate in order to prevent redundant pollen consumption which has no sensible effect on the yield.  Results and Discussion Calculated pollination and fruit setting efficiencies did not show a significant difference in all treatments, convincing that the traditional method could be replaced by pollen-duster without any yield difference. It offers benefits of lower pollen consumption; more trees pollinated in a day and also safer pollination due to reducing number of trees climbing. It was also shown that a tree could be pollinated properly with 0.5g pollen, so each hectare of date farm (120 trees) needs almost 180g pollen for all three replications, almost 1/4 of Perkins consumption report and 1/3 of Mostaan for three replications. Fruits weights of two pollen-flour treatments were significantly lower than others. As there is not any report available on the effect of the presence of flour or concentration of pollen on date fruits weights, so with the available data no definite reasoning can be made. Conclusion The developed pollen-duster could be used instead of the traditional date palm pollination method with the same fruit set and lower pollen consumption. The weight of the fruits in pollen-flour treatments `was lower than pure pollen and traditional treatments.
Authors and Affiliations
F. Akhavan,S. Kamgar,A. A. Golneshan,
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP717936
- DOI https://doi.org/10.22067/jam.v9i2.68916
- Views 71
- Downloads 0
Experimental Investigation of Plasma Nitriding on the Tribological Behavior of Small Dimension of Carbon Steel CK45 used in Farm Equipment
Introduction Nowadays, enhancing the impact-resistant and wear-resistant properties of the parts and devices used in the agriculture is necessary to increase the efficiency and lifetime. Among of metals, mild steels due...
Design and Development of a Solar Hydroponic Rotary Cropping Apparatus with an Intelligent Irrigation System
Introduction Global increase in the food demand and challenges regarding the water, energy and fertile soil has made it clear that current strategies are no longer efficient for maintaining food safety. Therefore, attent...
Effect of Frequency and Vibration Time on Shaker Performance for Mechanized Harvesting of Orange (Thomson cultivar)
Manual citrus harvesting is commonly performing hard, expensive and time consuming. In this study, a factorial experiment with a completely randomized design in three replications was performed to find out the effect of...
Evaluation of Two Types of Cotton Pickers in Terms of the Functionality and Quality of the Harvested Fibers
IntroductionCotton, as one of the most widely used products in various industries, has always been considered by leading countries in agriculture. The applications of this plant range from the food industry to the milita...
Optimization of the most important operational parameters of a pneumatic seeder using real-time monitoring for Cucumber and Watermelon seeds
Introduction: Since the application of pneumatic planters for seeds with different physical properties is growing, it is essential to evaluation the performance of these machines to improve the operating parameters under...