Establishment of maize grain elasticity on the basis of impact load

Abstract

By harvesting of wet maize (moisture content of grains about 35%) up to 40% grains can be damaged. Grain damage mostly depends on their Young’s modulus. It was established, that moisture content of grains varies by length of the cobs the grain Young’s modulus varies as well. It was estimated, that Young’s modulus of grains changed with moisture content of the grains and varied from 35 MPa to 85 MPa. The introduced in the article method of estimating grain Young’s modulus on basis of impact load enables to regard real condition of threshing, to choose optimal technological parameters for generating new methods of threshing.