Substantiation of geometric characteristics of the heap of castor bean seeds

Compared with other industrial and grain crops, castor beans have a complex of specific features, such as the multicomponent nature of its composition, uneven moisture content, high oil content of the kernel, fragility of the shells, high weediness, the need to peel the elements of its heap, etc. The consequence of such specific features of castor beans is the impossibility of effective application of existing equipment for its post-harvest processing. It is possible to increase the efficiency of the post-harvest seed treatment process by using special machines with the obligatory consideration of the physical and mechanical properties of the castor bean components. According to this, the article is devoted to the study of the geometric characteristics of a heap of castor beans. The castor bean cultivars that were studied are as follows: Donskaya, Aphrodite, Olesya, Khortychanka, VNIIMK-165, Early hybrid, Khortitskaya 1, Khortitskaya 3, Khortitskaya 7. The purpose of the article is to establish the linear dimensions of boxes and thirds of individual castor oil varieties in terms of their percentage. As experimental data, the length and thickness of the castor bean pods and the length, width and thickness of the thirds of the corresponding castor bean cultivars were determined. After statistical processing of the data, the interval series of each geometric size of the components of the castor bean heap were determined. The characteristics of the distribution of a randomly determined individual size were evaluated using the characteristics of variation series, such as: sample arithmetic mean corrected variance, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, range of variation, skewness and kurtosis. The significance of the results obtained lies, firstly, in the representation of the normal distribution law, suitable for calculating the corresponding percentage of a heap with a fixed geometric size, and secondly, in obtaining some estimates of practical interest. This concerns the choice of the designs of the working bodies of agricultural machines, which ensure the performance of the operations of separating the boxes and peeling the thirds of the heap in the general technological process of post-harvest processing of castor beans.