DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHECK ROW PLANTER FOR SMALL FARM MECHANIZATION
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Date
2019
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DIVISION OF AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING ICAR INDIAN AGRICULTURAL RESEARC INSTITUTE NEW DELHI
Abstract
India is an agricultural country where small and marginal land holding farmers
cultivate around 44 per cent of the area, and they involve in production of 60 percent
of total food grain. So, there is need to develop precision machines, suitable for small
farm. In check row planting, row-to-row distance is equal to plant-to-plant distance.
Check row planting is an essential part of precision agriculture, which allows weeding
in both directions and sunlight up to the bottom of the crop. The existing planters have
the problems of misalignment of seeds along the transverse direction due to slippage
of the ground wheel. It is also difficult to move the planter straight between the swath
during planting operation. In order to overcome these limitations of existing planter,
an electro-hydraulic row guiding system assisted check row planter with electronic
metering unit was designed and developed. The hydraulically operated row guiding
system was designed on the basis of force requirement to move the furrow opener
through the soil while planting. The physical and mechanical properties of seeds were
determined to design the seed metering system and seed box. The LIDAR distance
sensor was used to sense the distance from the reflecting surface. The LIDAR sensor
was calibrated in the laboratory and distance measured by the LIDAR sensor was
close to the Bosch laser distance sensor with mean deviation of 0.45 cm. The rotation
of the stepper motor in the metering system was controlled by the microcontroller on
the basis of signal received from the LIDAR sensor at set distance. The performance
parameters of the metering system were calculated at five different cell size (8.80,
9.73, 10.82, 11.90 and 12.83 mm) and cell speed (89.15, 99.46, 111.44, 123.41 and
133.72 mm.s-1
). The average seed spacing was close to theoretical seed spacing for
cell size of 11.90 mm and cell speed of 99.46 mm.s-1
. Multiple index, miss index and
precision increased with increase in cell speed while the quality of feed index
decreased with increase in cell speed. The optimised values for the cell size, cell
speed, mean spacing, quality of feed index, multiple index, miss index and precision
were found to be 11.90 mm, 99.46 mm.s-1
, 541.58 mm, 81.16%, 10.22%, 8.62% and
19.35% respectively. The check row planter was developed and assembled with the
row guiding system. The prototype planter was tested in the field and different
performance parameters were measured. The actual field capacity and field efficiency
of the planter were 0.12 ha.h-1 and 75.2% respectively. The field machine index for
the planter was 72.72 percent. The mean seed spacing along the row and across the
rows were found as 40.32 cm and 41.25 cm respectively in field condition. The
developed planter saves 84% of cost of operation over manual check row planting of
maize.
Keywords: Check row planting, Row guiding system, Electronic metering
mechanism and LIDAR sensor.
Description
t-10117
Keywords
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