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SOIL-CUTTING PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A HANDHELD TILLER’S ROTAVATOR BY FINITE ELEMENT METHOD (FEM)
Authors: Mingjin Yang, Po Niu, Bin Peng, Ling Yang, Yunwu Li, Xiaobing Chen, Zhuomin Peng
Number of views: 487
Handheld tillers are the main tilling machinery in hilly areas, with rotavators as the main tilling parts of the machines. The soil move, soil-cutting force and power consumption, accompanying the tilling process, are crucial to the performance of a handheld tiller. In this study, rotavators were chosen as a case study, and soil-cutting model of the rotavators was built and solved, by Finite Element Method (FEM), for the soil-cutting performance analysis, and the effectiveness of the analysis was validated as well, which will benefit and provide reference for design, optimization, and performance match of the handheld tillers. The results showed that: 1) during tilling process, particles of the top layer soil get the highest velocity and acceleration, and velocity and acceleration of middle layer and bottom layer particles decrease sequentially; 2) soil-cutting force of the rotavators increases to a maximum, and it gradually decreases to reach a relatively stable status with a certain fluctuation; 3) power consumption, combination of kinetic power and internal power, is mainly consumed by means of internal energy, and the ratio of kinetic power and internal power is 1: 9.5.