Design and Development of an Universal Vacuum Disc Equipped with Hole Adaptors for Precision Seeders

Year 2017, Volume: 13 Issue: 2, 93 - 98, 26.12.2017

Dilara Erdoğan Adnan Değirmencioğlu , Bülent Çakmak , , Arzu Yazgı

Abstract

The objective of this study was to design
and develop a vacuum disk equipped with hole adaptors for precision seeding of
different crop seeds. In order to meet this objective, a vacuum plate with a
pitch diameter of 190 mm and with 36 holes, each in the diameter of 8 mm was
designed and manufactured.  What makes
the disk for using different crops was the idea of adjusting hole diameter with
different adaptors at different diameters that makes them suitable for seeding different
crop seeds. If necessary some of the holes can be plugged and the number of
holes on vacuum plate can be reduced proportionally down to 18, 12 holes etc. This
would provide another option to the farmers in order to set the theoretical
seed spacing along with a change in transmission ratio via gear box available
in precision seeders. The adaptors designed in a special software was
manufactured on a 3D printer at a hole diameter of 2.5 and 4.0 mm in order to
use for seeding cotton and corn seeds, respectively. The adaptors were then plugged
on 8 mm holes and tested in the laboratory conditions by using sticky belt test
stand. Seed spacing values were measured by a computerized measurement system
(CMS) for the cotton and corn seeds. These tests were conducted in order to
find out how the use of adaptor materials as coupled with the steel vacuum
plate thus changing the coefficient of friction will affect the performance. The
theoretical seed spacing for both cotton and corn seeds was set to 11.8 cm and
a vacuum of 6.0 kPa was applied during the tests. The forward speed values were
selected to be 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 m s^-1. Quality of feed, multiple and
miss indices as well as coefficient of precision (CP3), Precision and E_rms
were considered as the performance indicators for precision seeding. The quality of feed index for cotton seeds was found to be 84.4 and
88.9% while the miss index contributed to the rest of the seed spacing
distribution of 15.6 and 11.1 % at forward speeds of 0.5 and 1.5 ms^-1,
respectively. The quality of feed index for cotton was obtained to be 100% at a
forward speed of 1.0 ms^-1. The quality of feed index for corn seeds
was found to be 100% at all forward speeds considered in the study.    

Keywords

Accuracy, measurement, metering unit, precision seeding

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