Safflower is an oil-seed crop with high quality oil that is used for producing healthy
foods and painting colors. This crop has valuable petals which have a lot of uses in
medicine, production of food colors and dyes for coloring fabrics, but such problem as
dispersion of flowers, thorns of crops that hurt worker’s hands also lack of a suitable
harvesting machine have enforced farmers to harvest petals by hand that is a hard work and
non-economic. In this study a prototype machine was designed and constructed. This machine
includes an engine, a radial fan with BI blades, a snout, a diffuser to separate petals
from airflow and a store; all parts are assembled on a trolley to move easily in farm.
This machine picks safflower petals out and intakes through snout by the fan suction
power. Petals go to diffuser where they are separated from airflow then fall to the store.
Velocity of airflow in the snout was determined by a fan test duct in order to design
diffuser. At last three farms were harvested by this machine for economic analysis.
Results show 657% increasing in amount of harvested petals by harvester machine in
comparison with hand harvesting.