Development and evaluation of spinning type granular fertilizer spreader attachment for drone applications
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Date
2023
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Punjab Agricultural University
Abstract
A study was conducted for the development and evaluation of a granular fertilizer broadcasting platform for applications with drones. The component of the developed system were a fertilizer handling hopper, spinning disc, fluted roller type metering mechanism and electronic control unit. The electronic control unit comprised an ATmega325P Arduino Uno based microcontroller, direct current (DC) motor driver board, two 12 v geared DC miniature motors, flysky FS CT6B transmitter-receiver remote control (RC) unit, a printed circuit board (PCB), and need based wires & connectors. The drone made by Joyance Tech Private Limited, Shandong, China, available in the department was used for the study by detaching its spraying system. Fluted feed roller and spinning disc was operated by DC motors. A compute program was written using Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) open source software and electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) of microcontroller was programmed using universal serial bus (USB) cable through a personal computer. The speed of fluted roller motor and spinning disc motor was controlled through RC unit for the defined values. The developed system was attached to the drone and its performance its performance was evaluated for uniformity of broadcasted fertilizer. The combined system was operated with two RC units, one for drone and second for broadcasting attachment. The developed system was tested for 2 levels of disc revolutions (300 rpm and 400 rpm), 3 levels of flow rate (2 kg/min, 2.5 kg/min and 3kg/min), 2 levels of height (1.5m and 2.5 m) and 3 levels of forward speed (1 m/s, 2 m/s and 3 m/s). The swath width and coefficient of variation (CV) for free swath width were in range of 3.39m to 4.67 m and 55.65 % to 79.08 %, respectively under all the treatment combinations. Theoretically, free swath widths were overlapped, stepwise, to find the swath widths with minimum CV under different treatment combinations. At selected minimum CV swath width, field capacity, application rate and field efficiency were found in range of 1.10 m to 2.20 m, 0.40 ha/hr to 2.38 ha/hr, 50.51 kg/ha to 378.79 kg/ha and 36.72% to 51.28%, respectively under all the treatment combinations. Minimum CV was found to be 9.4 % after overlapping. The highest field efficiency of 51.28 % was found at treatment combination H1F1N2S1 (1.5 m, 2 kg/min, 2.5 m and 1 m/s).
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Choudhary, Vishal (2023). Development and evaluation of spinning type granular fertilizer spreader attachment for drone applications (Unpublished M.Tech. thesis). Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India.