Anhydrous cleaning of tuberous roots with brushing working bodies

The creation of competitive, high-performance and reliable equipment that might ensure high-quality performance of the dry cleaning process, reduce energy consumption per unit of manufactured products and reduce all types of losses, is one of the priority areas of agricultural science. The cleaning of tuberous roots is an important complex of the pre-implementation preparation. Under the conditions of market relations, it has become important not only how to properly cultivate tuberous roots, but also how to make them more profitable from an economic point of view. One of the most time-consuming operations of post-harvest processing of tuberous roots arriving at stationary sorting points or sorting-and-cleaning lines after harvesting machines is the separation of quality products from soil impurities. The article discusses the effectiveness of using brushing working bodies based on elastic elements. Works considering the technological processes of interaction between brushing working bodies and tuberous roots have been reviewed. The schemes of the forces of interaction between the brush pile and dirt, the trajectory of the brush pile along the contaminated surface of the tuberous root, the shift of contamination, and the determination of the thickness of the cutting part of the pile are given. Existing devices for anhydrous cleaning cannot provide the required quality. Therefore, it is proposed to use vibration, thanks to which, while performing reciprocating vibrations on a transverse plane, the working bodies actively affect the surface of the tuberous root being cleaned. This is, in our opinion, a promising direction which requires further research.