INVESTIGATIONS ON OPTIMIZATION OF DESIGN AND OPERATIONAL PARAMETERS OF PNEUMATIC SEED PLANTER
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Date
2015-06-30
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Abstract
As we know that, seed planting is one of the crucial and time consuming operation in crop production. Therefore, design and development of precision pneumatic seed planter is need of hour for precision planting. The important physical and aerodynamic properties are studied using standard procedures and considered for designing the seed metering mechanism. A pneumatic seed planter was developed by optimizing design and operational parameters like vacuum pressure, cell diameter and rotor speed for cotton and okra seeds. Developed planter was evaluated to study the performance of seed metering mechanism under laboratory and field conditions. In laboratory evaluation developed seed metering mechanism was tested over instrumented test rig and seed spacing was monitored using computer vision system.
The maximum terminal velocity and drag coefficient was found to be
8.917 ms-1 and 0.63 of cotton and 5.98 m s-1 and 0.47 of okra seeds, respectively. Optimum vacuum pressure, rotor speed and cell diameter for cotton was found to be 2.72 kPa, 0.81 ms-1 and 2.66 mm with predicted responses of miss index, multiple index and precision index were observed to be 6.76, 3.89 and 10.81 per cent, respectively with combined desirability of 0.88. Similarly, the optimum values obtained for the okra seeds were 2.34 kPa (vacuum pressure),
0.75 ms-1 (rotor speed) and 2.05 mm (cell diameter) with the predicted responses of miss index, multiple index and precision index of 2.604, 1.117 and 7.0 per cent, respectively with combined desirability of 0.91. The optimum vacuum pressure and cell diameter can be used for cotton by considering additional factor of safety to overcome implement vibration and air leakage while designing seed metering devices. However, the results were verified by conducting planting operation under actual field by setting optimized design and operational parameters. The average seed rate per m2 was varied between 2.413 to 2.458 for cotton and 3.733 to 3.836 for okra across the furrow openers and hopper capacity
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