Agriculture is the largest single industry in the world, and seed production is an important segment of this industry. Seed, as it comes from the field, contains various contaminants like weed seeds, other crop seeds, and such inert material as stems, leaves, broken seed, and dirt. Therefore, cleaning of paddy is required. Additionally, non-availability of appropriate paddy cleaning machine at reasonable price is one of the major constraints for initiating small/medium scale manufacture of paddy cleaning machine. Therefore, this working is undertaken to develop an efficient low cost paddy cleaner in view of improving the quality paddy cleaning using conventional methods. To check the performance of the paddy cleaner, a total volume of 1.15kg of uncleaned paddy consisting of 1kg of paddy, 0.05kg of dust and 0.1kg of sand was fed into the hopper. After the cleaning process, the output obtained was 1.022kg of cleaned paddy with 0.994kg of paddy, 0.021kg of dust and 0.006kg of sand. Hence the performance of this machine is very efficient where most of the paddy produced is cleaned.

The knowledge of engineering properties such as gravimetrical properties (1,000 grain mass, bulk density, true density, and porosity), dimensional properties (length, width, thickness, aspect ratio, surface area, geometric mean diameter, and sphericity), frictional properties (angle of repose and coefficient of friction), and aerodynamic properties (drag coefficient and terminal velocity) are necessary parameters related to machine design for different agricultural process operations such as handling, harvesting, threshing, cleaning, conveying, sorting, drying, processing, and storage. India is a vast country and contributes 20% of the total world’s rice production with cultivars ranging from the scented long grain ones to the sticky short grains. The Kashmir valley cultivates mainly short–medium bold varieties as temperate conditions in the valley are not suitable for the cultivation of long grain scented basmati rice. The most steps in cultivation and postharvest processing are manual and the aim of this work is to emphasize which variety sustains the processing steps to produce high yield quality rice for strengthening the economic conditions of the people.

More than 40 million hundredweights of rice are produced in California's Sacramento Valley every year. After harvest, the rice is stored in facilities on-farm or off-farm until it is transported to mills or to ports for export. We conducted a survey of storage operations to characterize grain storage and pest management practices to guide future UC Cooperative Extension research efforts. The results indicate that grain moisture content, temperature and insect pest management are the most important challenges for both on- and off-farm storage operations. Survey responses show high adoption of integrated pest management programs, with most storage operations relying on monitoring, thresholds, sanitation and aeration to manage pest problems. Fumigant use was reported more frequently in off-farm storage operations than on-farm operations. Cooperative Extension educational efforts should focus on grain and temperature monitoring, insect identification and safe use of fumigants. Research is needed to improve management of grain temperature and moisture content, and insect infestations.

Rice milling industry is one of the most energy consuming industries. Like capital, labour and material, energy is one of the production factors which used to produce final product. In economical term, energy is demand-derived goods and can be regarded as intermediate good whose demand depends on the demand of final product. This paper deals with various types of energy pattern used in rice milling industries viz., thermal energy, mechanical energy, electrical energy and human energy. The important utilities in a rice mill are water, air, steam, electricity and labour. In a rice mill some of the operations are done manually namely, cleaning, sun drying, feeding paddy to the bucket elevators, weighing and packaging, etc. So the man-hours are also included in energy accounting. Water is used for soaking and steam generation. Electricity is the main energy source for these rice mills and is imported form the state electricity board grids. Electricity is used to run motors, pumps, blowers, conveyors, fans, lights, etc. The variations in the consumption rate of energy through the use of utilities during processing must also accounted for final cost of the finished product. The paddy milling consumes significant quantity of fuels and electricity. The major energy consuming equipments in the rice milling units are; boilers and steam distribution, blowers, pumps, conveyers, elevators, motors, transmission systems, weighing, etc. Though, wide variety of technologies has been evolved for efficient use of energy for various equipments of rice mills, so far, only a few have improved their energy efficiency levels. Most of the rice mills use old and locally available technologies and are also completely dependent on locally available technical personnel.

The conventional way to husk rice is to pass it between two rubber roller husker that are rotating with a surface speed differential. The resulting normal pressure and shear stress causes the husk to be peeled away from the kernel. The process is suited to high-rice flow rates, but is energy intensive and can result in considerable wear to the surfaces of the rollers. The operating parameters for machines of this design are usually determined and set empirically. In this article, some experiments and calculations had been carried out in order to explore the mechanisms involved in husking rice grains using this method. A simple sliding friction rig with load cell and high-speed camera was used to observe the mechanisms that occur during husking. The husking performance of different rubbers was compared for changes in the applied normal load. It was found that grains rotate between the rubber counterfaces on initial motion before being husked. In addition, harder rubbers were found to husk a higher proportion of entrained grains at lower applied normal load. By measuring the coefficient of friction between rice and rubber samples, the shear force required to husk a given percentage of grains could be calculated and was shown to be constant regardless of rubber type. Based on the mechanism seen in the high-speed video, it was evident that there was a limiting shear stress that was the governing factor over the husked ratio.
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