Abstract
Sesame has usually been harvested manually in korea. The conventional sesame harvest procedures consists of cutting, binding, drying and pod shattering. The procedures of drying and shattering are repeated $2{\sim}3$ times. By manual works of this conventional shattering, it was found that some extent of pods were has always remained unopened. Therefore, this study was conducted to find a way to save the labor of sesame shattering by use of a drying device; a prototype of shattering machine was developed and tested the performance. The developed prototype consists of several parts: a continuous horizontal inlet using a chain conveyer, a shattering by a shocking agitator, a rotating cone for shattering of remaining closed pods, and a winnow. The shattering ratio measured by this prototype was 90.3%, 6.4% and 3.3% at the first, second and third shattering step, respectively. We found that in contrast to the conventional method which required at least 3 times operations for complete shattering, this shattering prototype with the condition of sufficient dried sesame pod offered more than 90% of shattering ratio in the first operation.
