Development of a chopper unit for chopping of sunflower stalk during harvesting by combine harvester

Abstract

The aim of this research was the development of a chopping unit, which is placed under the header of a combine harvester. In this way, stalks can be chopped during harvesting and this will be useful in respect to saving time, labor, and energy. In addition, field traffic will decrease by using this unit.The alternative chopping unit may replace the conventional methods. For this objective, the developed chopping unit was tested in three different types of chopping methods. These methods were called Machine 1, Machine 2 and Machine 3. All methods were tested with two and three blade modules. The best results were obtained with 3 flat blades modules on Machine-2. While the average stalk size of Machine-2 was 14 cm, this value was 9.6 cm in 3 flat blades. With this machine the surface covering rate was 26.25%, the average height of stalk was 11.53 cm. This paper describes the structural features of the machine, the design of the main working parts, determination of the parameters of the position of the blade modules, and presents the performance tests.