Realizing high-quality and increased production of fresh corn and promoting diversified development of the corn industry structure not only can effectively promote the development of agricultural economy, but also can enrich people’s dietary culture. However, existing fresh corn machinery has a high rate of ear damage during the harvesting process, and the overall harvesting efficiency is not ideal. To reduce damage during the harvesting of fresh corn, a device for breaking ears of fresh corn was designed based on the directional clamping of corn straw reverse breaking method. Based on the physico-mechanical characteristics parameters of fresh corn ears, the main structural parameters of the directional clamping and conveying mechanism and the ear-breaking mechanism were determined. The overall inclination angle of the device is 15°, and the effective conveying length of the directional clamping mechanism is 550 mm; the ear-snapping mechanism comprises a snapping roll composed of a pair of six radial distribution function fingers, with an effective operating radius of 320 mm. By simulating and analyzing the reverse breaking movement of directional clamping corn straw, the key motion parameter ranges of the directional clamping conveying mechanism and breaking mechanism were obtained. The results of the bench test showed that under the optimal conditions of a directional clamping feeding speed of 1.67 m/s, a breaking wheel speed of 80 rpm, and a travel speed of 1.06 m/s, the lowest ear damage rate was 0.57%, and the lowest impurity rate was 1.87%. In addition, it was observed that flexible harvesting can improve harvest efficiency and quality. The study also found that actively applying force to the device can effectively avoid the problem of machine blockage and reduce the damage rate of ears (the following text uses ears instead of fresh corn ears).

To solve the problems of congestion and increased power consumption of wheat combine harvesters (WCHs) caused by excessive feed rate, this paper proposes a method to reduce the feed rate by decreasing the feed length of the stalk and designs a double-cutterbar combine header (DCH). Using the threshing test bench and taking the feed rate, the feed length of the stalk, and the speed of the tangential threshing rotor as the influencing factors and the conveying time as the index, the influence of different parameters on the conveying performance was analyzed. The optimal parameters were obtained: the feed rate was 8 kg/s, the feed length of the stalk was 380 mm, the speed of the cutting drum was 554 r/min, and the conveying time was 8.089 s. The optimized parameter combination was tested and verified, and the test results show that the relative error with the predicted value was 0.198%, proving the reliability of the optimized parameters. The critical components of the DCH were designed, the movement process of the profiling mechanism was simulated using ADAMS software, and the structural dimensions of the profiling mechanism were determined. The field performance test of the WCH with a DCH was carried out. The results showed that the loss rate and stubble height met the operation quality requirements. At the same operation speed, the fuel consumption was 11.2% less than that of the WCH with a conventional header, providing a technical reference for the efficient harvest of the WCHs.