Design and Experiment of Sweet Potato Up-Film Transplanting Device with a Boat-Bottom Posture

Abstract

Aimed at solving the problem of the incidence of large film-breaking holes in the current sweet potato boat-bottom-shaped transplant, a boat-bottom-shaped up-film transplanting device was designed. Starting from the agronomic requirements of sweet potato up-film transplanting with a boat-bottom posture, an arc-shaped gripping mechanism was designed. In order to avoid further tearing and breaking the film hole during the movement of the clamping mechanism under the membrane, a transposition mechanism and a positioning cam were designed to jointly control the movement of the clamping mechanism. In order to ensure the stability of the transplanting plant spacing during the operation of the machine, a rotary encoder was used to collect the forward speed of the machine and adjust the speed of the power shaft in real time. Field experiments were carried out in order to verify the reliability and stability of the operation of the above-mentioned design mechanism. In the field test, the advance speed was used as the test factor, and the test indexes included three indexes of the seedlings after transplanting and three indexes of the film holes. The test results showed that the qualified rate of node depth in the middle of the seedling (QRNDMS) is between 95.67% and 86.79%, the qualified rate of root depth at the base of the seedlings (QRRDS) is between 94.00% and 90.11%, and the qualified rate of seedling length into the soil (QRSLS) is between 97.89% and 91.67%. The film hole spacing is between 240.33 mm and 245.32 mm, the film hole length is between 37.01 mm and 42.10 mm, and the film hole length variation rate is between 1.05% and 7.48%. This study can serve as a reference for up-film transplantation, particularly for boat-bottom-shaped up-film transplantation devices.

Design and experiment of the side insertion horizontal transplanting device for sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas Lam.) seedlings on mulch film

“…The distances meet the requirements of the transplanting depth and transplanting length of sweet potato seedlings. The transplanting device designed in this paper selects a transplanting depth of 50 mm, which is in accordance with the existing sweet potato transplanting machinery [7,23,24] . The structure of seedling clamping mechanism is shown in Figure 5.…”

“…At present, there are transplanters that can realize the overlap between the points entering and leaving the field ridge. For example, Shao et al [23] developed the a transplanting mechanism for sweet potato seedlings with 'boat-bottom' transplanting trajectory. In which, the two points entering and leaving the field ridge are overlapped at the cost of the increase of transplanting distance of sweet potato seedlings to about 350 mm.…”

Design and Experiment of Sweet Potato Ridging and Forming Machine

“…As a specialty food crop, sweet potato has many production links, usually transplanted after ridging. Currently, the ridging and shaping process can basically finished by machine, but the existing machine is difficult to meet the agronomic requirements of sweet potato, especially the height of the ridge and the soil compactness, affecting the sweet potato transplanting operations and future field management [2,3].…”