Reserch And Design For Key Parts Of Self-Propelled Garlic Planting Machinery

China is one of the leading countries in garlic production in terms of planting area and export amount. However, manual planting mode has long been used for domestic garlic production, which reveals disadvantages such as hard work, low efficiency, poor working quality and high cost, etc., limiting the development of garlic production. Although there are very few models of domestically made garlic planting machines which are able to achieve automatic garlic planting, requirements such as keeping garlic clove upright with its root downward and avoiding damage of garlic seed can not be met, leading to lower budding percentage and poor quality of the products. It is of importance to develop high quality garlic planting machinery.The main contents of this research include:(1) To determine the major specifications of self propelled garlic planting machinery, based on the analysis of recent related publications, patents, garlic planting requirements, and measurements and statistics of garlic seeds dimensions (cultivar:Er Shui Zao, which is a major cultivar in Jiangsu Province, China).(2) To design structure of the transplanting mechanism which is the key component of garlic planting machinery.(3) To establish simulation models of transplanting mechanism followed by dynamic simulation to obtain the variations of major parameters such as velocity, acceleration and trajectory of seed clamper, and seed cave dimensions.(4) To determine the optimization objective and constraints of transplanting mechanism.(5) To resolve the optimization model and obtain the optimal structural parameters.(6) To complete the optimization design of the transplanting mechanism.(7) To establish the kinetics equations of rear type transplanting mechanism, and complete the simulation load analysis for hinges within each phase of the movements.The major results are summarized as follows:(1) Structural design refinements of rear type transplanting mechanism were completed. (2) Seed cave width was selected as the optimization objective based on the analysis of garlic planting requirements, and its optimal value of21.5mm was determined based on the measurements and statistics of garlic seed dimensions. Constraints were established based on the requirements of plant spacing and row spacing to the transplanting mechanism.(3) Optimal structural parameters of the transplanting mechanism were obtained with MATLAB, the optimal length of crank, frame, rocker, link, clamper and structural link were21.32mm,57.14mm,69.57mm,159.91mm,69.57mm and152.4mm.(4) Design for the cam which is one of the main components of driven mechanism was completed with the help of ADAMS, and its maximum pressure angles of34.12°and69.92°within working and return strokes respectively, were verified to be less than the required values of engineering design.(5) Based on the improvement of rice seedling transplanter, models of seed pushing mechanism both for optimization and dynamic simulation were established. The results showed that the optimum values of lengths of the link and shifting fork were19.89mm and50mm, which produced a32mm working stroke of seed pushing rod, meeting the requirement for garlic planting. Moreover, the maximum force between the link and seed pushing rod was12.82N, much less than that of pre-improvements.Based on the analysis of features of garlic seed dimensions and rice transplanter which is used as the designing basis, parameters of the garlic transplanter and factors related to movements and structure which affects the performance of garlic planting machinery were investigated. Optimization design theory was utilized to obtain the optimum values of parameters which may be used as guidance for design of other mechanism of garlic planting machinery.