Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important grain legume nutritionally balanced for human consumption. The physical properties of chickpea seeds are important for harvesting, handling, drying, storing, de-hulling, processing, and packaging. This study was carried out to determine the effect of different variety and grown environment on the engineering characteristics and physical properties of 11 released and promising chickpea varieties. Eleven Ethiopian promising chickpea varieties were evaluated for physical properties, engineering properties and soaking test. All physical and geometric properties highly significant at (p < 0.05) differences were observed almost in all seed varieties in the three different environment locations, these indicating that there was some requirements variation in the processing equipment design. The average geometric diameter mean, hundred seed weight, length, width, thickness, sphericity, aspect ratio, bulk density, true density, porosity, seed volume, seed surface area and moisture content are 7.22 to 8.43mm, 28.11 to 39.72g, 8.76 to 9.82mm, 6.83 to 7.96mm, 6.75 to 7.66mm, 83.10 to 87.13%, 76.85 to 82.92%, 0.32 to 0.48g/ml, 1.22 to 1.46g/cm3, 25.55 to 36.78%, 161.41 to 261.52, 968.46 to 1326.53 and 10.85 to 12.06%, respectively. The soaking or water absorption of chickpea grain in different time and temperature were showed significant difference among varieties and grown location. Mean diameter showed high positive correlation with that of thickness, seed volume and surface area (r = 0.99). Totally as soaking time and temperature increased, the per cent of water absorption of chickpea seed varieties were increased in parallel with different magnitude. The results of this research can be used for design and adjustment of agricultural machines of these different chickpea varieties and recognition and classification of them.
Citation: Oli Legesse, Lamesgen Yegrem, Derbie Mengestu, Workneh Abebe and Negussie Girma (2022) Physical Properties and Geometric Characteristics of Promising Ethiopian Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Varieties, Global Journal of Agricultural Research , Vol.10, No.4, pp.39-52
Keywords: Geometric Characteristics, Physical Properties, chickpea varieties
