The invention of the harvesting machine is suitable to be used by small and medium industry of local farmers due to its low cost and offers practical and easy to operate process. Besides, the use of reel-wheel-chain mechanism to substitute blower or fan resulted in less energy required for the harvesting process.

This harvesting machine is used to harvest agricultural crops not limited to herbs and vegetables, and easily collect the harvest during manual or automatic operation.

The uniqueness of the machine is due to its superb performance as compared to the manual method and offer energy efficiency due to the incorporation of reel-wheel-chain mechanism to rotate the reel automatically without the assistance of a motor.

This harvesting machine is designed specifically to harvest herbal plant such as Misai Kucing in both open area and under photovoltaic (PV) panel. The height of the machine can be adjusted only using lynchpin, thus substituting the lathe to assist in adjusting the height of the harvester.

During operation, the chains, which connect reel and wheel, are used to transmit motion and power from a sprocket and shaft at the caster wheel to another shaft at the rotator.

This transmission mechanism using chain due to short centre distance between shafts which less than 8 meters. A different number of sprocket teeth was optimized to control the speed of reel. The production capacity of the Misai Kucing Harvester machine was measured in term of weight of the Misai Kucing harvested in one hour. The time to completely harvest a row of Misai Kucing under the solar PV is recorded.

The capacity of the harvester machine is 24.89 kg/hr. It shows 30 times increase in production capacity using the Misai Kucing harvester machine compares to the conventional method.

The performance efficiency of the Misai Kucing machine was measured by the weight of Misai Kucing harvested and enter the collector, and Misai Kucing not harvested and not collected.

The efficiency of Misai Kucing harvester machine is 93.53%, which is considered high and successfully meets the requirement of the design.

Ts. Dr. Mohd Salahuddin Mohd Basar
Faculty of Engineering
Email : salahuddin@upm.edu.my

Date of Input: 30/06/2022 | Updated: 30/06/2022 | asrizam