Pulping machines are an integral part of production lines for the processing fruits and vegetables. To meet the ever-growing demand for these agricultural products, it is necessary to introduce innovative solutions to modernize equipment not only for increasing its productivity but also for ensuring its safety. The article proposes a pulping machine that helps to increase the productivity by using the entire area of the sieve drum. The productivity also depends on reliable and safe equipment operation, elimination of downtime during product pulping. One of the main factors affecting the reliable and safe operation is the pressure of pulped product on the walls of the sieve drum, and this pressure depends on the product density. It has been experimentally shown that the density of pulped product can vary significantly even for different varieties of vegetable marrow. As the calculations show, in this case the pressure inside the sieve drum of the pulping machine changes considerably (more than 10%). Therefore, the density of the product should be taken into account when calculating the design parameters of the pulping machine; it helps to ensure its reliable and safe operation and hence to reduce the probability of downtime and to improve the productivity.

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A set of measures is taken to protect plants against various diseases and to prevent yield losses. One of the components of such actions is a pre-sowing seed treatment. One of the effective ways of pre-sowing treatment is seeds ozonization, which stimulates their germination and provides the prevention of plant diseases, hence this process increases the germination and the yield of agricultural crops. Our laboratory equipment was made to substantiate the ozonation regimes. Experimental studies on seeds ozonation were carried out for agricultural crop (the zucchini variety Zebra), which is widely used in Russia, particularly in the natural-climatic areas of the Urals. Taking into account that high ozone concentrations are dangerous to human health and life (to service personnel), pre-sowing seeds treatment was carried out at relatively safe concentrations (up to 10 mg/m3), paying attention to the tightness of the equipment. Ozone concentrations of 3 mg/m3, 6 mg/m3 and 9 mg/m3 and seed treatment time of 120 min, 240 min, 360 min and 480 min were chosen. The experimental studies have shown, that a rational regime of seeds treatment for obtaining the maximum germination (79.1%), is observed when ozone concentration is 9 mg/m3 and treatment time is 247.7 min. Thus, the developed laboratory equipment helps to determine the rational ozonation regimes for zucchini seeds. It can also be used to determine the rational ozonation regimes for seeds of other crops.

There are many methods to determine the economic efficiency of implementing the labor safety activities. But in most cases, they cannot completely take into account the aggregate change in the effects of harmful and dangerous occupational factors on the human body before and after the implementation of relevant measures, and therefore they cannot give a fairly objective economic evaluation. This primarily relates to non-stationary workplaces, where production-related factors can be changed to a large extent during one shift. Therefore, it is expedient to evaluate economic efficiency for such jobs on the basis of the analysis of workers disease rate, which depends on the impact of all production-related factors on the human body. It is possible to distinguish production-related workers disease from the entire morbidity of employees including occupational injuries using the method of integrated assessment of working conditions through the losses of working time from morbidity with temporary incapacity for work (integrated assessment methodology). This technique can be used to calculate the economic efficiency when implementing labor safety activities at non-stationary workplaces (e.g. driver’s workplace).

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