Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2012
Safflower is an oil-seed crop with high quality oil that is used for producing healthyfoods and painting colors. This crop has valuable petals which have a lot of uses inmedicine, production of food colors and dyes for coloring fabrics, but such problem asdispersion of flowers, thorns of crops that hurt worker’s hands also lack of a suitableharvesting machine have enforced farmers to harvest petals by hand that is a hard work andnon-economic. In this study a prototype machine was designed and constructed. This machineincludes an engine, a radial fan with BI blades, a snout, a diffuser to separate petalsfrom airflow and a store; all parts are assembled on a trolley to move easily in farm.This machine picks safflower petals out and intakes through snout by the fan suctionpower. Petals go to diffuser where they are separated from airflow then fall to the store.Velocity of airflow in the snout was determined by a fan test duct in order to designdiffuser. At last three farms were harvested by this machine for economic analysis.Results show 657% increasing in amount of harvested petals by harvester machine incomparison with hand harvesting.