INMATEH - Agricultural Engineering

22-32

Authors: Wusong XIAO, Po NIU, Pan WANG, Yingjie XIE, Fei XIA

Mini-tiller is an indispensable agricultural machinery in hilly and mountainous areas of China. Rotary blade is an important working part of mini-tiller, which directly affects the operation quality and power consumption of mini-tiller. In order to reduce the cutting resistance and power consumption of the rotary blade of mini-tiller, the cutting process of the rotary blade was analyzed by numerical simulation, and the tangential bending radius (R), bending angle (β) and edge thickness (c) of the rotary blade were selected as factors to optimize it. After comparing the cutting resistance and cutting power consumption of the rotary blade before and after optimization, the results show that the cutting force of the optimized rotary blade is smaller than that of the rotary blade before optimization. The cutting power consumption of the optimized rotary blade is 2.4% lower than that of the unoptimized rotary blade, which achieves the purpose of drag reduction and consumption reduction.

45-56

Authors: Zhenkun ZHI, Haifeng LUO

In order to solve the problem of complicated processes, low efficiency and high cost of economic tree trunks girdling, inspired by cam mechanism this study developed a new type of automatic half-ring girdling device, which can automatically complete a series of operations, including the tree trunk profile scanning, girdling trajectory calculating and automatic bark cutting. A pair of laser rangefinders and guide screws were symmetrically arranged on a half-ring rotating rail, which could rotate around the tree trunk, and two chainsaws assembled above the guide screws were controlled to move radially. The laptop was used as upper computer, and a 4-axis motion control card was used as the lower computer, which constituted the control system of precise movement. The programs of the tree trunk profile scanning, the xylem profile curve fitting and the chainsaw centre trajectory calculation were designed in LabVIEW. The scanning tests and girdling experiments were carried out on the different sections of the tree trunks in the laboratory. The feasibility of the automatic girdling device for economic tree trunks was verified with one complete and automatic girdling operation finished by this device, which took 150 seconds, and the error range of automatic girdling was within ±2mm. This device improves the automation degree of girdling operation and provides a support for the development of economic forestry.

77-86

Authors: Huhu YANG, Junlin HE, Jiaxuan LU, Tao WANG, Yuehua WANG, Yanxi GUO

This paper addresses the problem of the lack of intrinsic and contact parameters when applying the discrete element method to simulate and analyze the key aspects of white kidney bean seed sowing, harvesting and clearing. The experiment took white kidney bean seeds as the research object, measured the intrinsic parameters of white kidney bean seeds by using the universal testing machine, and measured the collision recovery coefficient of 0.445, static friction coefficient of 0.452 and rolling friction coefficient of 0.091 between white kidney bean seeds and Q235 steel plate by physical test and EDEM discrete element simulation parameter calibration. The stacking experiment was carried out by the cylinder lifting method, numerical processing was performed with MATLAB, and the actual stacking angle of white kidney bean seeds was 31.28°. The steepest climbing test was designed with the interspecific contact parameters as factors and the relative error between the actual and simulated stacking angles as indicators. The optimal combination of the interspecific contact parameters of white kidney bean was determined by response surface optimization analysis, and the interspecific collision recovery coefficient of white kidney bean was obtained as 0.39, static friction coefficient was 0.53, rolling friction coefficient was 0.092. Using the optimal parameters for the simulation test, the relative error between the actual stacking angle of white kidney bean seeds and the simulated stacking angle was 1.63%, indicating that the calibrated simulated contact parameters were reliable and could provide reference for the discrete element simulation of white kidney bean seeds.

96-105

Authors: Jinglong REN, Huili ZHANG, Guangyuan WANG, Chenlong DAI, Fei TENG, Moxian LI

This research is dedicated to enhancing the accuracy and processing speed of grape disease recognition. As a result, a real-time grape disease detection model named MSCI-YOLOv8s, based on an improved YOLOv8s framework is proposed. The primary innovation of this model lies in replacing the backbone network of the original YOLOv8s with the more efficient MobileNetV3. This alteration not only strengthens the ability of the model to capture features of various disease manifestations in grape leaf images but also improves its generalization capabilities and stability. Additionally, the model incorporates the SPPFCSPC pyramid pooling structure, which maintains the stability of the receptive field while significantly enhancing processing speed. The integration of the CBAM attention mechanism further accentuates the ability of the model to identify key features, substantially increasing the accuracy of disease detection. Moreover, the model employs Inner-SIoU as the loss function, optimizing the precision of bounding box regression and accelerating model convergence, thereby further enhancing detection efficiency. Rigorous testing has shown that the MSCI-YOLOv8s model achieves an impressive average precision (mAP) of 97.7%, with an inference time of just 37.2 milliseconds and a memory footprint of 39.3 MB. These advancements render the MSCI-YOLOv8s not only highly efficient but also extremely practical for real-time grape disease detection, meeting the actual demands of grape orchard disease identification and demonstrating significant potential for application.

117-128

Authors: Moxian LI, Xueliang CHANG, Xiaoning HE, Ning ZHANG, Wei LIU, Zhixin LIU, Tongtong DONG, Shuqi SHANG, Dongwei WANG, Maomao ZOU, Yunkang LI, Zhenjia MA

Aiming at the traditional peanut planter seed and fertilizer sowing depth inconsistency caused by seed burning and injury, fertilizer waste and low seed emergence rate, the design of a peanut planter with high-speed operation and controllable seed and fertilizer sowing depth was performed. The laser sensor is added to detect the height of the ridge and the furrow opener position feedback, and the speed sensor detects the operating speed of the peanut planter. The mechanical analysis of the four-link rod clarifies the control principle, improves the PID algorithm of the integral term, designs the control strategy based on the operating speed of the planter, controls the electro-hydraulic system, and realizes the sowing and fertilizing depth adjustment of the furrow opener. Through the design of three-factor three-level orthogonal simulation test, it is concluded that the vehicle speed and height deviation value are significant factors affecting the sowing and application depth, and under the verification of the field test, it is obtained that when the sowing depth is 50 mm under the speed of 3 km/h, the dynamic sowing depth qualification rate is 96.26%, and the maximum coefficient of variation of the sowing depth is 2.58%, which improves the effect of the existing control of the sowing depth of the peanut by 6.05%, and reduces the variation of the sowing depth by 2.85%. The research has demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional mechanical adjustment in regulating the planting depth of peanuts, thereby achieving the intended design objective.

138-147

Authors: Zhixin LIU, Shuqi SHANG, Shikuan MA, Yaxiu HOU, Tongtong DONG, Xiaoning HE

Aiming at the potato soil separation device of potato harvester, which generally has the problem of potato high damage in potato-soil separation, a three-stage potato soil low-loss separation device was developed, and orthogonal experiments were designed with the help of RecurDyn-EDEM coupled simulation method. A field bench was built for verification tests. The test proved that: when the lift transport chain speed was 1.40 m/s, travel speed was 0.60 m/s, amplitude was 32.0 mm, the impurity rate was 1.49% and the average force on potato was 1.801 N. The potato damage rate was 2.7%, indicating that the design of the three-stage potato soil low-loss separator device worked well.

162-172

Authors: Fengli LI, Jianghui CHEN, Keyi LIU, Jia ZHANG, Yaou ZHANG, Junchi YIN, Fei LIU, Manquan ZHAO

In order to solve the problems of easy seed shedding and poor seed population mobility during sowing, a precision seed metering tray for edible sunflowers with seed guide strips was designed in this paper. This article aims to adjust the adsorption posture of sunflower seeds by designing three types of structures: triangular seed guide strip, rectangular seed guide strip, and diamond seed guide strip. Seed population motion simulation and seeding performance experiments were conducted on the seeder. The experimental results show that adding a triangular seed guide strip to the seeding tray has the best disturbance effect on the seed population, with the highest proportion of seeds in the first adsorption stance seed (the seed centroid was adsorbed) and the highest qualification index. The working parameters for the best seed metering performance were obtained: the rotating speed of the seed metering disc was 8.41 r/min, and the vacuum degree was 3.5 kPa.

183-192

Authors: Yongpeng CHEN, Yi NIU, Weidong CHENG, Laining ZHENG, Dongchao SUN

To improve the accuracy of apple fruit recognition, enhance the efficiency of automatic picking robots in orchards, and provide effective visual guidance for the picking robot, a target recognition network model based on improved YOLOv5 is proposed. Firstly, the original apple images collected and the data images obtained by different data enhancement methods are used to establish a dataset of 1,879 images, and the dataset is divided into the training set and the test set under 8:2; then for the problem of low detection accuracy of apple fruits in the natural environment due to the mutual obstruction of apple fruits, this paper modifies the backbone network of YOLOv5 by adding the attention mechanism of the Transformer module, the Neck structure is changed from the original PAFPN to BiFPN that can perform two-way weighted fusion, and the Head structure adds the P2 module for shallow down sampling; finally, the recognition test is performed on the dataset, and a comparative analysis is performed according to different evaluation indexes to verify the superiority of the proposed model. The experimental results show that: compared with other existing models and the single-structure improved YOLOv5 model, the comprehensive improved model proposed in this paper has higher detection accuracy, resulting in an increase of 3.7% in accuracy.

203-213

Authors: Yupeng JIANG, Aiping SHI, Feng LIANG, Jun YANG

With the rapid urbanization in China, there has been a gradual increase in the production of kitchen waste, which poses significant environmental challenges. High-temperature aerobic fermentation is an effective method for recycling kitchen waste. This study focuses on utilizing kitchen waste, wood chips, and compound microbial agents as the main raw materials for fermentation. Various parameters such as temperature, moisture content, and amount of compound microbial agent were selected to conduct experiments on the high-temperature stage of the aerobic fermentation process for kitchen waste. Through response surface optimization experiments, it was determined that the optimal conditions for achieving fast high-temperature fermentation of kitchen waste are as follows: temperature at 60℃, moisture content at 60%, and amount of compound microbial agent at 10%. The order of influence on the reduction rate of kitchen waste is found to be temperature followed by the amount of compound microbial agent and moisture content. These findings provide valuable insights into resource utilization strategies for managing kitchen waste.

224-234

Authors: Hexia CHU, Hongxing LIU

Both cruising ability and safety should be considered in the 3D inspection path planning of agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Specific to a complex working environment, the 3D inspection environment of agricultural UAVs was simulated through terrain modeling and threat modeling. First, the dynamic constraints of flight approaching rate and response time were added to the threat cost, and the 3D mission space model and flight path cost function were constructed considering the influence of UAVs’ turning performance. Second, the offset estimation strategy, variable spiral search strategy, quasi-reverse learning strategy and dimension-by-dimension mutation strategy were introduced into the dung beetle optimizer (DBO) algorithm to improve the global optimization ability and convergence rate of the algorithm. By establishing a three-dimensional trajectory planning model for unmanned aerial vehicles, the trajectory planning is transformed into a multi-objective function optimization problem, and an improved algorithm is used to solve the three-dimensional trajectory planning of unmanned aerial vehicles. The fitness is evaluated by considering the objective function of trajectory cost, terrain cost, and danger level, and the trajectory planning is iteratively optimized. The results indicate that the proposed improved dung beetle algorithm for trajectory planning has lower overall cost and stability in adapting to different complex terrain environments.

245-254

Authors: Ioan Aurel CHERECHES, Ferenc GASPAR, Ioan Alin DANCI

Soil moisture monitoring and control are essential aspects for precision agriculture. The paper presents the designing and calibration of a low-cost soil moisture monitoring system. The system includes 28 capacitive sensors, connected to an Arduino based data acquisition system, allowing simultaneous multi-point measurements. The calibration process was conducted on six reference points within the moisture content range of 0–25%. The calibration results indicate a non-linear variation and reveal a significant deviation between the sensors leading to the determination of individual variation curves for each sensor.

265-279

Authors: Nadiia SHMYGOL, Władysława ŁUCZKA, Nataliia GAVKALOVA, Zhanna HARBAR, Viktor KOVAL, Lucian-Ionel CIOCA

The study analyses trends in domestic markets and international trade in organic products in some Eastern European countries based on a multifactorial comparative analysis in the regional context and estimates of yield losses about traditional agricultural land processing technologies. Prospects for the development of organic farming by region and in general are determined based on unused reserves of agricultural land suitable for this. The study assessed the organic production development in different regions of Poland and Ukraine: the annual growth rate of transitional and organic lands should be at least +13.3% to meet the strategic goal of reaching 3% of the total agricultural land by 2030.

291-298

Authors: Bin WANG, Lili LI

Soluble solid content (SSC) is one of the important evaluation indexes of the internal quality and taste of fresh jujube. In order to realize the online nondestructive detection of SSC of fresh jujube, this paper took Huping jujube as the research object, adopted self-constructed nondestructive online testing system to collect the spectral information of jujubes (350~2500 nm), and studied the influence of the rotational speed of 4 r/min on the online prediction model of SSC of jujube. Kennard-Stone (KS) algorithm was used to divide the sample into correction set and prediction set. Six commonly used preprocessing methods such as SG smoothing (S-G), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), standard normal variate (SNV), orthogonal signal correction (OSC), first derivative (FD), and second derivative (SD) were applied to the spectral data, and the regression coefficient (RC) algorithm and the successive projections algorithm (SPA) were utilized to select informative wavelengths, and a quantitative prediction model for the SSC of Huping jujube was established using partial least squares regression (PLSR). The results indicate that the PLSR prediction model established by preprocessing the original spectrum with OSC and combining it with RC algorithm to select characteristic wavelengths was optimal. Therefore, when predicting the SSC of Huping jujube, the optimal model was OSC-RC-PLSR, and the correlation coefficients of the correction set and prediction set were 0.846 and 0.782, respectively, and the corrected root mean square error (RMSEC) and predicted root mean square error (RMSEP) were 1.962 and 2.247, respectively. The results show that non-destructive detection of soluble solid content of jujube can be achieved by combining visible-near-infrared spectroscopy and appropriate regression model, which provides an innovative way for online sorting and identifying fresh jujube.

313-323

Authors: Wenqi GUO, Wenyi ZHANG, Yunxia WANG, Youqiang DING, Bin QI

In order to study the effect of population disturbance on the filling performance of the seed metering device, this paper uses the pneumatic precision seed metering device as the model, and uses EDEM software to simulate the population movement of three different seed metering devices. The bench test was carried out at different pressures at 12 km/h and at different speeds at 3.5 kPa. The results show that the designed seed disk with grooves has the most intense disturbance and the highest qualified rate. In order to verify the performance of the disk, full factor tests are carried out on the air pressure and speed, The test results show that when the operating speed is 10~12 km/h and the positive pressure is 3~3.5 kPa, the leakage rate is no higher than 5.42%, the replay rate is no higher than 0.42%, and the qualified rate is no lower than 94.58%. When the operating speed is 14 ~ 16 km/h and the positive pressure is 3.5~4 kPa, the leakage rate is not higher than 6.7%, the replay rate is not higher than 1.04%, and the pass rate is not lower than 93.12%. All the indicators are better than the national standard.

339-351

Authors: Yong DING, Jian ZHANG, Zhiguo PAN, Weijing WANG, LIU Qi, Shuai WANG, Zhenjia MA, Xiaokang WANG

The analysis of the clearing process of the cutting deck of a small plot wheat combine harvester requires the use of discrete element simulation methods. However, the current simulation test lacks the contact parameters such as wheat stalk and stalk-seed. In this paper, the wheat stalks and seeds at harvest time were taken as the research objects, and the calibration study of the discrete element simulation model parameters of stalks and stalk-seeds was carried out by means of mechanical test determination and EDEM software simulation. The stiffness coefficients of wheat stalks were determined by mechanical tests; the average values of wheat stalk stacking angle of 39.22° and wheat stalk-seed stacking angle of 44.41° were obtained by stacking angle tests. By the steepest climb test and binary regression test, the stalk normal stiffness coefficient was determined to be 5e+08N/m2 and tangential stiffness was determined to be 6.35e+08N/m2; the stalk-stalk collision recovery coefficient was obtained to be 0.551, static friction coefficient was obtained to be 0.797, and rolling friction coefficient was obtained to be 0.079 by the two-level analytical factorization test, the steepest climb test, and the three-factor response surface test. Based on this, the average value of wheat stalk-seed stacking angle was obtained to be 39.22° and the average value of wheat stalk-seed stacking angle was obtained to be 44.41° by the stacking angle test. On this basis, the coefficient of recovery of stalk-stalk collision was 0.434, the coefficient of static friction was 0.884, and the coefficient of rolling friction was 0.339 obtained by the three-factor response surface test. Three validation experiments were carried out by substituting the obtained parameters into the simulation test, and the error values were close to the error value %0.255 in the model, which proved that the experimental data were reliable.

375-390

Authors: Shihao WANG, Shouhao XIA, Yongxin CHEN, Chao LOU, Dinglin REN, Zhaodong LI

The rolling friction coefficient was a fundamental parameter for particle modeling, but it was challenging to quantify for unevenly shaped corn seeds. If the rolling friction coefficients of corn with different guiding seeds and different shapes were not believed to be significantly different, direct simulation in EDEM would produce simulation distortion. This paper began by selecting three models with a relatively high proportion from five corn samples with various shapes (such as horse-tooth shape, spherical shape, oblate shape, and irregular shape, etc.) and modeling them according to the actual seeds. Due to the large disparity between seed models with different shapes, the study adopted the method of combining physical experiment and discrete element simulation, took the rolling friction coefficient as the independent variable and the angle of repose in the simulation test as the target value, and calibrated the rolling friction of various shapes of corn seed particles separately. Coated corn seeds' rolling friction coefficients were accurately predicted (0.0047 for horse tooth, 0.0058 for pyramid, and 0.049 for spherical shape). During the validation test, the calibrated simulation parameters were entered into EDEM for simulation, and the distribution of seeds on the seed platter was compared between the actual test and the simulation test. The results demonstrated that the difference in the sizes of key features was less than 5.60 percent, and the population boundary in the seed platter after calibration was closer to the actual situation, which improved the accuracy of the simulation.

414-428

Authors: Kuan QIN, Yun ZHAO, Rui YANG

In this study, a double-shaft type sweet potato rice-planting and rice-returning machine was designed. The structure of the whole machine as well as the key components were analyzed, and the influence of each factor on the operation quality was studied. The results of the study showed that the order of the influence of each factor on the length of broken stems and leaves and the rate of checking was as follows: roller speed > toggle clearance > toggle spacing; the order of the influence on the stubble height was as follows: toggle clearance > roller speed > toggle spacing; and the order of the influence on the rate of injury to potatoes was as follows: roller speed = toggle clearance = toggle spacing. The optimal combination of working parameters in the field test was 1944 r/min for roll speed, 132 mm for toggle spacing, and 20 mm for toggle clearance, at which the qualification rate of stem and leaf breaking length was 94.32%, stubble height was 33.61 mm, and potato injury rate was 0.26%. The relative error with the theoretical optimization value is between 0.13% and 7.14%, which meets the operational requirements of sweet potato rice transplanter.

444-453

Authors: Hongwei DIAO, Wenlong YE, Zhicheng ZHANG, Xin LIU, Fandi ZENG, Xuying LI, Ji CUI, Zhihuan ZHAO

This study measured the intrinsic and contact parameters through physical experiments to improve the accuracy of discrete element simulation analysis of peanut seeds. Discrete element models for five different peanut seed filling ball numbers were established. The simulation parameters were calibrated through a combination of physical and simulation experiments. Firstly, the Plackett-Burman test was used to screen the significance of simulation parameters. Then, the steepest climbing test was conducted to determine the optimal range of significance parameters using the relative error be-tween the simulated and the physical experimental as the evaluation index. Finally, a response surface experiment with three factors and three levels was conducted using the repose angle as the response value. The static and rolling friction coefficients among peanut seeds were set as 0.43 and 0.50 separately, and the rolling coefficient between peanut seeds and steel plate was set as 0.12. During verification experiments, the simulated repose angle was 25.18°, with a relative error of 2.42% compared to the physical repose angle, further verifying the reliability of the simulation model. The re-search group used different numbers of filling balls with optimal parameters in the repose angle experiment. Then they evaluate the simulation time and the error value of repose angle between the simulated and physical experiment. The optimal number of filled balls is the Sphere 1178. The research results indicate that discrete element model of peanut seeds and calibration parameters are reliable. Based on the results of this research, an intelligent peanut precision sowing machine can be developed.

480-491

Authors: Xiaodong LOU, Zheng LI

In this study, the discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm was proposed to plan the path of agricultural robots traversing multiple fields in hilly areas. Based on the basic ABC algorithm as the framework, the path coding method was adopted, and the discrete crossover operator, reverse operator, immune operator, and single/multi-step 2-opt operator were comprehensively used to help hired bees, observing bees, and scout bees to generate new food sources. Finally, the optimized field traversal order and the entrance and exit distribution of each field were obtained. The simulation results showed that compared with the traditional ABC algorithm, the average shortest path of the DABC algorithm proposed in this study was shortened by 1.59%, accompanied by the less iterations contributing to algorithm convergence and good ability to jump out of the local optimal solution. The simulation experiment was carried out using real field data and field operation parameters. The field traversal order and the entrance and exit distribution obtained by the proposed method can effectively reduce the length of the transfer path and its repeatability. This study exhibits superiority and feasibility in the field traversal path planning of agricultural robots in hilly areas, and the trajectory coordinates output by the algorithm can provide a path reference for large-area operations of agricultural machinery drivers or unmanned agricultural machineries.

514-524

Authors: Jiahao LAN, Yunjie MA

To solve the problem that the moving trajectory and operating trajectory are relatively independent and time-consuming when robots transfer agricultural products from harvesting fields to warehouses or transport vehicles, a type of agricultural materials handling robot was designed, the optimal trajectory planning method for the collaborative operating time of agricultural materials handling robots was proposed, and the time optimal trajectory under the collaborative operation of robot operating system and traveling system was acquired. Specifically, the kinematic model and dynamic model for the collaborative operation of robots were established to perform time optimal trajectory planning for materials handling robots, the Beta distribution was then applied to the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) for population initialization, and a nonlinear convergence factor was introduced to prevent local optimum in the later stage of iterations. Finally, WOA was improved combining the variable neighborhood algorithm to enhance the diversity of the neighborhood structure, and this improved algorithm was applied to model solving. The results reveal that the proposed trajectory planning method can facilitate robots to obtain a smooth and time optical moving trajectory in collaborative operations of materials grabbing and discharging and obstacle avoidance. The displacement, speed, acceleration, and force/torque curves of each joint of the robots change gently, and the double-crawler traction can meet the requirements of the robots and rapidly stabilize and track the time optical trajectory.

535-546

Authors: Dangqin XUE, Zhouming GAO, Jiaxi ZHANG

In this paper, a new horizontal-shaft roller-type cotton stalk puller was designed to address the problems of weak research on cotton stalk pulling and harvesting machines, poor agronomic adaptability, and insufficient research. First, the physical and mechanical properties of cotton stalk were experimentally studied, and the cotton stalk pulling force test was conducted. and it was positively correlated with the cotton stalk diameter. Then, the moisture content and the bending characteristics of cotton stalk were evaluated. The test results showed the bending characteristics were positively correlated with the moisture content but were not evidently influenced by the diameter. Second, with the missed pulling rate and pull-off rate as the evaluation indexes and three independent variables, namely, forward speed, linear speed of stalk pulling rod, and rotation speed of stalk pulling roller, as the influencing factors, a 3D response surface model was established. On this basis, the lack-of-fit term P (p = 0.3650) > 0.05 of the evaluation index—missed pulling rate P1—was acquired, and the P value of pull-off rate P2 was always smaller than 0.0001. Finally, the results demonstrated that the influence of various factors on the missed pulling rate of cotton stalk is significant and followed the order forward speed > linear speed of stalk pulling rod > rotation speed of stalk pulling roller; the significance level regarding the influence on the pull-off rate followed the order rotation speed of stalk pulling roller > linear speed of stalk pulling rod > forward speed. Through the parameter optimization analysis, the optimal parameter combination was obtained which coincide with the model optimization and prediction result. The proposed method provides a basis and experimental reference for studying cotton stalk harvesting machineries.

25-43

Authors: Wenwen SONG, Yu WAN, Bo ZHOU, Fuming KUANG, Wei XIONG, Juan LIAO, Dequan ZHU, Shun ZHANG

In order to solve the problems of unstable seeding quantity and poor applicability of traditional lightweight simplification mechanical seed-metering device, a combined cavity-type rice precision hole-drop seed-metering was developed. According to the material characteristics of rice seed and the requirements of seeding quantity, the innovative metering hole structure achieves the purpose of accurate filling of rice seed. In order to adapt to the demands of different rice seeds and improve the accuracy and convenience of the adjustment of the seeding quantity, the number of cavities involved in seeding operation was simply adjusted. Bench tests are carried out on the effects of the seed-inlet width, the metering hole slope angle, and the cavity outer angle on the precision seeding performance of the seed-metering device. The test results show that when the outer and middle seed-inlets width both are 3.8 mm, the innermost seed-inlet width is 5.4 mm, and the metering hole slope angle is 35 °, and the cavity outer angle is 85 °, the performance of the three kinds of rice was better. Opening outermost seed-inlet to seeding super hybrid rice, the qualified rate is 90.67%, the miss-seeding rate is 3.77%. Opening outer and middle seed-inlets to seeding hybrid rice, the qualified rate is 90.80%, the miss-seeding rate is 3.73%. Opening all three seed-inlets to seeding conventional rice, the qualified rate is 90.67%, the miss-seeding rate is 3.53%. The field test shows the seed-metering device can also meet the requires of these kinds of rice seeding.

53-69

Authors: Chenwei HU, Jiayu CAO, Shuo ZHANG, Yu CHEN, Liquan LU

As an important plant protection machinery for spraying and fertilizing crops, high clearance self-propelled sprayer is of great significance to promote food security production and stable development of agriculture. Aiming at the complex operating conditions and unique operating requirements of large high clearance self-propelled sprayer, this paper analyzes and determines the main components of the sprayer suspension, such as elastic components, guiding devices, buffer devices, damping components, etc., and designs a stand-alone vertical shaft air suspension system structure suitable for high clearance sprayers. The stress of the sprayer chassis under different extreme conditions such as side slip, emergency braking and uneven road driving is analyzed, and the vertical shaft is designed and checked in detail. Based on the stress analysis results of the sprayer chassis, the finite element analysis software HyperMesh 10.0 was used to analyze the statics of the key components of the suspension, such as the vertical shaft, the motor protection shell, the steering arm, and the spring top support. According to the results of force analysis and finite element analysis, combined with the requirements of process production, the suspension structure in the design scheme is improved, and the final suspension form and the whole structure scheme of the sprayer are obtained. Through this study, it provides a basis for the design and development of large high clearance self-propelled sprayer.

83-92

Authors: Mykhailo ANELIAK, Alvian KUZMYCH, Serhii STEPANENKO, Viktor LYSANIUK

The article presents the results of studies of the process of threshing leguminous grass seeds with a drum-type threshing device. The process of material movement in the working gap of the drum deck was modelled and the intensity of the action of the working on the material under optimal operating conditions was substantiated. The dependence of the completeness of threshing alfalfa seeds on the number of rasp bar actions on the material on pendulum copra and in a threshing device was obtained based on the results of laboratory research. The influence of the design and technological parameters of the threshing device on the efficiency of threshing alfalfa seeds, as well as on the energy indicators of their operation, has been determined. The rational parameters of the threshing device are substantiated, which ensure complete threshing of seeds at the level of 96.5-98.2%, and damage to no more than 0.8% of seeds.

103-114

Authors: Bin WANG, Lili LI

In order to perform highly effective identification of external defects and increase the additional value of Cerasus Humilis fruits, this study used hyperspectral imaging technology to collect information on intact and defective Cerasus Humilis fruits. Based on the full transition spectrum, partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and back propagation neural networks (BPNN) were used to establish a discriminative model. The competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) was used to extract feature wavelengths, principal component analysis was used for data compression of single band images, BPNN and convolutional neural networks (CNN) were used for defect Cerasus Humilis fruits recognition of principal component images. The results showed that the overall detection accuracy of PLS-DA and BPNN models based on wavelength spectral information were 83.81% and 85.71%, respectively. BPNN was used to establish the calibration model based on the selected characteristic wavelengths by CARS, the accuracy rate was 90.47%. The classified accuracy of CNN model based on principal component images was 93.33%, which was obviously better than that of BPNN model at 83.81%. The research shows that the CNN model was successfully applied to the detection of Cerasus Humilis fruits defects using hyperspectral imaging. This study provides a theoretical basis for the development of fruit grading and sorting equipment.

124-135

Authors: Linwei LI, Yanbo SONG, Jie SUN, Yuanyuan LU, Lili NIE, Fumin MA, Xinyu HOU, Juxia LI, Yanwen LI, Zhenyu LIU

Maize eyespot and maize curvularia leaf spot are two diseases that often occur on maize leaves. Because of the similarity of the shape and structure, it is difficult to identify the two diseases just relying on the observation of the growers. For the harmfulness and prevention methods are different, it would cause great loss if the disease can't be identified accurately. To address this issue, this paper first employs a connected region feature recognition method to design an automated lesion cropping process after acquiring leaf images with several lesions. Subsequently, a lesion recognition model based on the AlexNet architecture is built and subjected to five-fold cross-validation experiments. The results indicate that the model achieves a comprehensive recognition accuracy exceeding 99%. To further comprehend model characteristics, an analysis of the recognition accuracy and its fluctuations is conducted, revealing that the fractal growth and biological characteristics of the lesions may influence the recognition results. Moreover, the distribution of model parameters could be a potential reason for fluctuations in recognition accuracy rates with increasing number of iterations. This paper could offer valuable reference and support for the intelligent identification and diagnosis of maize and other plant diseases.

147-163

Authors: Petru CARDEI, Nicolae CONSTANTIN, Cătălin PERSU, Vergil MURARU, Raluca SFÎRU, Maria IAMANDEI, Daniel LATES

The aim of the research is to highlight some statistical tools that favour extracting the components of the dynamic process that are dependent on the forward speed of some agricultural aggregates. The main objectives are: (I) identification of a minimum number of components in a multitude of random variables, with the help of which the other random variables can be calculated, and the application of this result to the strain gauge measurements; (II) establishing the connection between the synthetic results that partially solve the first objective and the forward speed of the agricultural aggregate. The second objective is used to obtain indications in search of the parameters’ dependencies on the forward speed of the aggregate. The first objective seeks to determine a group of three signals from the twelve, with the help of which the best multivariate linear interpolation is obtained for the other nine signals, which in physical terms means the reduction to a quarter of the measurement points and of the strain sensors used. A result associated with the first objective refers to the estimation of information loss due to the limited number of deformation sensors mounted on the tested structure. The article also presents attempts to use the results of the theory of neural networks and statistical interaction. In order to capitalise on the experimental data in this complex statistical framework, it is necessary to monitor at least the working speed (not only the average speed per experiment), fuel consumption, working depth (continuously monitored), soil moisture etc.

173-184

Authors: Qian DONG, Guohai ZHANG, Yuqian ZHAO, Fukang ZHOU, Peng LIU, Yihu WANG, Xipeng QIAN

Aiming at the traditional FMECA (Failure Modes, Effect and Criticality Analysis) results of the threshing and cleaning system, which are strongly influenced by subjective factors, imprecise and easy to repeat, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is introduced to quantify the results of the expert evaluation and reduce the subjective influence. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to assign weights to each influencing factor, and by calculating the comprehensive hazard level index, the hazard ranking of each failure mode is carried out, from which the critical failure modes are identified as the focus of improvement, so as to improve the reliability of the system. Comparison shows that the improved method effectively makes up for the shortcomings of the traditional FMECA analysis method, and it is easier to find out the critical failure modes, which provides a theoretical basis for practical application.

194-204

Authors: Yaxiu HOU, Shuqi SHANG, Xiang LI, Xiaoning HE, Haifeng ZHENG, Tongtong DONG, Xu LI, Zhixin LIU, Shuai YANG, Dongwei WANG

Aiming at the problems of low threshing efficiency and high damage rate of current threshing devices. In this study, the operational form of the threshing drum and the structure of the threshing element were innovated, and a new threshing drum with low damage and high efficiency was designed. Using EDEM software, flexible body modeling of corn kernels, cobs and whole ears was carried out. The dynamic analysis of the corn threshing process was completed and the simulation parameters were further optimized. The optimum operating parameters were analyzed by orthogonal rotational tests and response surface method with a speed of 800 r/min for the threshing drum, a clearance of 10 mm for the concave plate and 30 mm for the threshing drum. The radius of the round head of the threshing element was 5 mm. The height of the threshing element was 60 mm. The final threshing efficiency was 98.78% and the damage rate of threshing was 0.62%. The results show that the new threshing device can meet the requirements of low-loss threshing devices for corn combine harvesters and can provide a theoretical basis for the development of the theory and technical system of corn plot combine harvesters in the future.

215-224

Authors: Biao XIE, Jinyin BAI, Jiagang YAN, Shibo ZHAO, Nian LIU, Qiang ZHANG

Aiming at the lack of discrete element simulation models and parameters for rice polishing, grading, color sorting and other technologies and equipment, and the difficulty of guiding equipment design and optimization through simulation, this paper calibrates the simulation parameters of white rice based on angle of repose (AOR) test and simulation methods. Huanghuazhan and Dongnong 429 white rice were selected as research object. Numerical model of white rice was established by multi-sphere filling. According to physical test and references, the simulation parameter range of white rice particles was determined. Plackett-Burman test was used to screen parameters, and it was found that the particle-particle static friction coefficient and particle-particle rolling friction coefficient had significant effects on the AOR of white rice. The regression model between the AOR and the significance parameter was established according to the central composite design method. The simulation parameter combination that has significant influence on the physical AOR was determined through the optimization design, and verified by the simulation test. The simulation AOR was compared with the physical AOR, and the relative error of the two kinds of white rice was less than 3%. The results show that the calibration method proposed in this study can accurately simulate the physical AOR test, which can provide reference for discrete element simulation of white rice processing.

237-247

Authors: Fang LI, Xiaohu BAI

During the operation of a boom sprayer, various excitations can cause the boom to roll, yaw, or jolt, which can negatively impact the spray effect. In order to maintain the stability of the boom, it is crucial to incorporate a suspension between the vehicle body and the boom. This study established a dynamic model that describes the roll of a boom mounted on a double-pendulum suspension. The transfer function and frequency response function of the passive suspension were obtained, with the ground slope angle as input and the boom inclination angle as output. The analysis results showed that the passive suspension can partially isolate high-frequency disturbances but cannot follow low-frequency signals. For the active suspension, the transient and frequency responses were analyzed by numerical integration algorithm, the harmonic balance method and numerical solution. The results indicated that the active suspension can enable the boom to follow the ground slope, track low-frequency signals to a certain extent, and isolate high-frequency signals. The proposed mathematical model can be utilized to analyze the dynamic characteristics and provide guidance for the double-pendulum suspension design.

259-270

Authors: Shike GUO, Min FU, Xiaoman CUI, Zijan WANG, Chengmeng WANG

For the standardized apple orchards in China, which are mainly dwarfed and densely planted, firstly, according to the spatial distribution characteristics of fruits within the tree canopy, a clamping-pull-off apple picking robot was developed by analyzing the parameters of apple cultivation and picking methods, in order to replace the manual harvesting operation. Then, the D-H method was used to establish the kinematic Equations of the apple-picking robot, the forward and inverse kinematic calculations were carried out, and the Monte Carlo method was used to analyze the workspace of the robot. Through the robot picking task planning and the simulation of the trajectory of the robotic arm, the scheme of the robot's picking strategy was given, and MATLAB software was applied to simulate the motion trajectory as well as to verify the feasibility of the trajectory planning scheme and the picking strategy. Finally, an apple-picking test bed was set up, the corresponding picking control system program was designed, and 45 apples were selected for picking tests. The results showed that during the robot's picking process, the average time for picking each fruit was 7.59 seconds, the fruit recognition success rate was 86.67%, and the picking damage rate was 5.13%.

282-289

Authors: Zhouhua LIU, Xin YOU, Penghui QIAO, Mengjun CHEN, Weiwei CHEGN

Passive solar greenhouses are developing rapidly in China and they can significantly increase crop yields. The main reason for this increase in crop yield is the availability of a suitable thermal environment. In order to investigate the thermal environment of the heliostats in the high latitude water-scarce and cold region of Shanxi, the thermal environment of the heliostats in this region was measured in this paper, and the results showed that the highest temperature of the heliostats was located in the eastern part of the crop area at about 4m from the back wall; the highest and lowest temperatures of the heliostats were located in the eastern part of the crop area;the maximum and minimum temperatures in the greenhouse were located in the eastern part of the crop area, and the temperatures in most of the crop area exceeded 30°C. This research can provide theoretical support for the construction and management of solar greenhouses in low heat and water areas at high latitudes.

301-318

Authors: Haijun BI, Pengcheng JIA, Kuan QIN, Lei YU, Chengmao CAO, Dongsong XIA, Xinliang GUO, Yang LIU, Bin CHEN, Yuzhen BI

The gas–solid coupling of a porous hot-air tea de-enzyming and carding machine was studied by means of computational fluid dynamics and discrete element coupling. In the numerical model, the discrete phase of tea particles was simulated using Rocky-DEM software, while the gas phase was described by ANSYS Fluent software. A mathematical model of the movement characteristics of tea particles in air was established according to the principle of fluid mechanics, to carry out dynamic analysis of tea particles’ movement process and derive how the motion of gas and tea particles is governed. Three sets of prototype tests were carried out on the basis of the design and simulation, and the average of their results taken. This showed that the hourly output of the test prototype was 3.89 kg/h, the bar-type rate was 89.14%, the de-enzyming moderation rate was 91.67%, and the average value of the measured effective operating temperature of the pot slot was 189 °C. The performance of the prototype was also tested and analyzed. After conducting a tea sensory evaluation expert appraisal, the sensory evaluation indices of the prototype-processed tea satisfied all current market requirements, being superior to those of the conventional de-enzyming and carding machine. The quality of the finished tea also met the agronomic standards and the operational requirements of the de-enzyming and carding machine.

327-334

Authors: Guoliang YOU, Yaoming LI, Hanhao WANG

The value of high moisture content crops is higher and the planting area is wider. However, in the harvest process, due to the high moisture content, the cleaning loss is greater. In order to reduce the adhesion between the crop extraction mixture and improve the cleaning performance, a method of hot air cleaning was proposed. By using the fan design theory and thermodynamics, the prototype design of the hot air fan was completed. Through orthogonal test, the most suitable parameter combination is 1445r/min fan speed and 85℃ air inlet temperature. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to observe the air velocity and air temperature of the outlet under the optimal combination of parameters to check whether it meets the requirements of hot air cleaning. The reliability of numerical simulation was tested by bench test. Finally, a field experiment was carried out with the hot air fan to observe the difference between the cleaning effect and the fan under the optimal parameter combination, and compare the cleaning loss rate.

345-355

Authors: Kuizhou JI, Yaoming LI, Binbin JI, Zhenwei LIANG, Tuo DU

In this paper, the basic rigid unit and discrete element rigid model of reed stem and discrete element flexible model of reed stem were established by means of multi-spherical filling and other methods. Then, three-point bending test was carried out in EDEM software to complete the calibration of bonding parameters. Finally, simulation analysis was carried out with the loss rate as the index. The simulation results show that the optimal parameter combination is 46 r/min for the transverse transmission device, 53 r/min for the vertical clamping longitudinal transmission device, and 470 mm for the center distance of the drum. Finally, the initial field test verifies that the maximum parameter combination of the harvester header is 49 r/min for the transverse conveying device of the header, 51 r/min for the vertical clamping longitudinal conveyor and 1.1 m/s for the field forward speed of the reed harvester, and the loss rate of the harvester is 3.36%, and the optimal parameter combination is consistent with the simulation analysis results.

367-378

Authors: Svitlana YUKHYMCHUK, Serhii YUKHYMCHUK, Mykola TOLSTUSHKO, Igor TSIZ, Nataliya TOLSTUSHKO

The article describes a new design of the disc-belt flax-pulling apparatus, which will increase the durability of the pulling belts and reduce the material consumption of the flax gleaning machine. The geometrical parameters of the pulling section of the disc-belt flax-pulling apparatus have been established. The energetics of the process of picking flax stalks, which are clamped in the curved longitudinal pulling stream of the disc-belt flax-pulling apparatus, have been theoretically investigated. The dynamics of changes in the components of pulling power when moving the flax stalk along the pulling stream were studied, depending on: the initial inclination of the flax stalk; from the forward speed of the flax harvester; from the angle of inclination of the pulling apparatus to the horizon. The energy per second of pulling and the value of its components are determined.

391-405

Authors: Zhiguo PAN, Tianfeng SUN, Xiaomeng WANG, Qiuqiang HOU, Shiting LV, Luming ZHANG, Zhenfei YANG, Xuehui ZHANG

To overcome inadequate functional integration, irregular pits, and insufficient agricultural machinery and agronomy in tobacco seedling transplanting equipment under film, a digging transplanting integrated machine was built. The machine uses parallel four-bar mechanism. The excavation equipment uses conical spiral blades. Using the trajectory approach, the four bar mechanism's fundamental parameters can be reversed. This method meets the requirements for coordinated excavation and transplantation. Mechanical study of soil units determines upward movement characteristics. Additionally, spiral angle, spiral blade outer diameter, and spiral blade speed are quantified to affect soil movement. The range of factors is derived. Based on three factors binary regression orthogonal combination simulated optimization experiment, a discrete element analysis was performed to enhance parameters. Experimental factors optimized include a spiral angle of 19°, a spiral blade diameter of 378 mm, and a rotational speed of 258 rpm. The two optimized test indicators are: a 193 mm hole depth and 350 mm hole diameter. The improved results were verified by field validation studies using a 191 mm hole depth and 347 mm hole diameter. The simulation optimization results and field validation experiment results are very similar. This study provides a technical basis for tobacco farming concurrent drilling and transplanting research.

419-428

Authors: Shandong YANG, Chuang MA, Baochang ZHANG, Yinping ZHANG, Jinchang YANG

Aiming at the problems of low land utilization and serious water waste in the existing wheat planting pattern, a two-high and two-low wheat high-low border spaced apart planting mode was proposed, and a high and low borders wheat no-till planter that can finish stubbing, fertilization, border construction, seeding and other tasks was designed. The design and analysis of the ship-type ridging device were carried out, and the construction process was simulated to determine the optimal parameters. A field test was carried out, the average sowing depth was 3.17 cm, the qualification rate was 95%, the standard deviation was 0.38 cm, and the coefficient of variation was 12.06%. The average value of the width of the seedling belt was 9.40 cm, the qualification rate was 91.67%, the standard deviation was 0.29 cm, and the coefficient of variation was 3.09%. The average height difference between the high and low borders was 9.26 cm, the pass rate was 100%, the standard deviation was 0.35 cm, and the coefficient of variation was 3.83%. The average width of the borders was 52.18 cm, the qualified rate of the border width was 100%, the standard deviation was 1.00 cm, and the coefficient of variation was 1.93%. The differences between each index and the theoretical design are small and meet the agronomic requirements.

441-450

Authors: Xihang SUN, Ziwen GUO, Guanghui WANG, Chen CAI, Zhiqin WANG

This study analyzes the drying of alfalfa using hot air, infrared and combined drying techniques. Different temperatures, radiation heights, radiation power and wind speed are used as control factors, and drying time, color, crude protein and specific energy consumption are used as evaluation indicators. After assigning weights to each indicator, the comprehensive evaluation index is calculated. The comprehensive evaluation index of alfalfa drying after combined drying is between 1.00 and 1.30, which is overall higher than hot air drying and infrared drying. Combined drying technology can effectively improve the efficiency and quality of the alfalfa drying process.

459-469

Authors: Zeyuan YAN, Ming SUN

In recent years, the problem of “rural labor shortage” in China has become increasingly serious, with a large number of young laborers going out to work, leading to an increasing amount of idle rural land. The intensification of population aging and the reduction of agricultural labor force in China resulted in an urgent demand for agricultural robots. With the rapid development of agricultural machinery and automation technology, agricultural robots have been continuously developing. They can better adapt to the development of biotechnology in agriculture, and traditional harvesting methods may undergo significant changes, with an increased focus on the cultivation of crops. Therefore, this paper introduces a new encoding scheme on the basis of traditional genetic algorithm (GA) and proposes an improved double encoding GA. This new encoding scheme is used on the crossover link, whereas the path node sequence encoding scheme is still used on the mutation link. The selection operation is placed after the mutation, and the merging sorting and elitist selection are performed on the parent population, crossover population, and mutation population before selection, thereby accelerating the convergence speed. On the basis of the improved GA, the three-dimensional path of the apple harvesting robot is designed and planned, with the addition of adaptive adjustment function during the progress. The experimental simulation results show that the three-dimensional path planning of the apple harvesting mobile robot based on the improved GA can minimize the number of paths and loops and well meet the operational requirements of the harvesting robot.

483-498

Authors: Adrian IOSIF, Edmond MAICAN, Sorin BIRIȘ, Lucretia POPA

Quality assessment of apples is a pivotal task in the agriculture and food industries, with direct implications for economic gains and consumer satisfaction. Traditional methods, whether manual, mechanical or electromechanical, face challenges in terms of labor intensity, speed, and quality control. This paper introduces a solution using machine learning algorithms – specifically, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) – for a more nuanced and efficient apple quality assessment. Our approach offers a balance between the high-speed capabilities of electromechanical sorting and the detailed recognition achievable with human evaluation. A dataset consisting of over 2000 apple images, labeled as 'Good' or 'Damaged', was compiled for training and validation purposes. The paper investigates various architectures and hyperparameter settings for several CNN models to optimize performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, and recall. Preliminary evaluations indicate that the MobileNet and Inception models yield the highest levels of accuracy, emphasizing the potential of machine learning algorithms to significantly enhance apple quality assessment processes. Such improvements can lead to greater efficiency, reduced labor costs, and more rigorous quality control measures.

511-521

Authors: Iuliana GĂGEANU, Florbela CARVALHEIRO, Adam EKIELSKI, Luis C. DUARTE

The focus of the research was to evaluate the use of lignin from different sources as an agent for the removal of diverse types of microplastics when present in wastewater. Organosolv lignin was obtained from three different sources (Miscanthus sp., pine bark and solid anaerobic digestates from Organic Fraction of Municipal Solid Wastes) by an ethanol-based organosolv treatment carried out in a pressurized stirred-tank reactor. The lignins obtained were evaluated as an adsorbent for diverse types of microplastics: High-density polyethylene (HDPE), Polystyrene (PS), Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), and Polypropylene (PP). All lignins used had the capacity to capture plastic particles from all plastic types, but a differential absorbance potential was found both for plastic types and lignin samples. EPS was the least adsorb type for all lignin sources, with the remaining plastics presenting equivalent results. Pine bark lignin was the best adsorbent among the tested feedstocks, always presenting the best performance for all plastic types. The direct utilization of organosolv hydrolysates, avoiding lignin recovery presented a similar behaviour. These results open the possibility to develop new natural, plant-based, adsorbents for microplastic removal from contaminated wastewater.

535-547

Authors: Fengkui ZHANG, Wenxi SHAO, Shijie ZHAO, Jikui ZHU, Ping LI

To improve the quality of air suction jujube picker, the CFD-DEM coupled method is used to numerically simulate the conveying process of jujube particles and explore the motion state, particle collision and energy loss of jujube particles in the pipeline. The erosion rate is selected as an evaluation index to discuss the influence of wind velocity, bending angle and diameter on the conveying process. The simulation results show that the collisions between jujubes, as well as the collisions between jujubes and pipe wall have an impact on the conveying performance, and the latter is more significant. The erosion rate is positively correlated with the wind velocity, negatively correlated with the pipe diameter, and the bending angle first decreases and then increases. The influence degree of factors on the erosion rate is: wind velocity > bending angle > pipeline diameter. The optimal parameter combination is a wind velocity of 28 m•s-1, a bending angle of 105 °, and a pipe diameter of 130 mm. At this time, the value of erosion rate is the lowest and the number of collisions and energy loss between jujube particles are reduced by 37.3 % and 13.87 % year-on-year, and those between jujube particles and pipe wall are reduced by 17.45 % and 17.61 % year-on-year, respectively. The test results show that the conveying pipe with optimized structural parameters can reduce the jujube skin damage rate by 2.06 %. The results of this study can provide a reference for the design and optimization of the air suction jujube picker.

558-565

Authors: George IPATE, Constantin Daniel COTICI, Alina-Daiana IONESCU, Viorel FATU, Iuliana GAGEANU, Dan CUJBESCU, Ana Maria NICOLAU

In this research, the data from temperature measurements obtained with the InfiRay T2S+ device, an infrared thermal imaging camera have been checked to monitor plant thermal behaviour. Plant leaf temperature is a parameter frequently used as representative for stomatal conductance, as stomatal confinement results in attenuated transpiration, and consequently leads to increased plant temperature. Also, to identify the stress of the plant, indices of thermal and modified stress have been calculated. The results obtained show that the Kalanchoe blossfeldiana species chosen for this study, when exposed to extreme values of temperature or water requirements, presented significant changes in the infrared electromagnetic wave spectra.

573-582

Authors: Qian SUN, Yang SONG, Zhigang YANG, Xiaorui LIU, Shimao CUI

Chinese solar greenhouses (CSGs) are the important agricultural building facility with highly efficient and sustainable utilization of solar energy. In order to improve the thermal insulation performance and reduce the heat loss, different insulation cover measures were applied to Chinese solar greenhouses. In this study, a solar greenhouse with an internal insulation blanket (SG1), a greenhouse with an internal blanket and an internal plastic film (SG2) and a greenhouse with an external blanket, an internal blanket and an internal plastic film (SG3) were chosen as experimental objects to analyze their indoor temperature environment. The results indicated that the differences of solar radiation interior among three greenhouses were similar, which was not the main reason that caused the differences of the temperature environment in the three greenhouses. During the tests, the nighttime average temperature was increased by 2.1-3°C by adding the cover materials, and the duration of nighttime temperature greater than 8°C was increased by 33.5%-38.2%. In addition, the cost is increased by adding the insulation cover materials, but it will be beneficial for greenhouse production to reduce additional energy consumption.

599-610

Authors: Jinbao LIU, Xuan ZHENG, Yanhui ZHANG, Yuying SONG, Zhihui TANG

During the tillage of two-way ploughing equipment in rocky and barren soil, due to hard objects such as stones, the plough and the key working parts such as plough column are deformed and broken, thereby reducing the reliability and service life of machines and tools. As such, an anti-overload automatic obstacle avoidance mechanism for two-way ploughing is developed. The maximum obstacle avoidance height is 40 cm, and the obstacle avoidance angle α is designed. The rotation range is 4.6 ~51.5°, and the effective compression stroke of the spring after pre-tightening is 39.34 mm. The motion equation and quasi-static force equation of the mechanism are established. The plowing resistance in the equilibrium state is 9.74 KN, and the required spring preload is 9.75 KN. Under the safety factor of 1.3, different spring elastic coefficients change with the rotation angle of the mechanism. The virtual prototype simulation model of the anti-overload automatic obstacle avoidance mechanism is established. The simulation results show that the mechanism can effectively perform the obstacle avoidance action. Bench test verifies that the mechanism can avoid obstacles according to the predetermined load. The field test shows that the stability coefficient of the ploughing depth of the mechanism is less than 8%. The results can effectively realize the obstacle avoidance function and ensure the farming quality, and provide an efficient and reliable anti-overload obstacle avoidance structure and parameter basis for the rocky land.

625-636

Authors: Lijuan FAN

Currently, drones have been gradually applied in the field of agriculture, and have been widely used in various types of agricultural aerial operations such as precision sowing, pesticide spraying, and vegetation detection. The use of agricultural UAVs for pesticide spraying has become an important task in the agricultural plant protection process. However, in the crop spraying process of agricultural UAVs, it is necessary to traverse multiple spray points and plan obstacle avoidance paths, which greatly affects the efficiency of agricultural UAV crop spraying operations. To address the above issues, traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms have strong solving capabilities, but they are prone to falling into local optima. Therefore, this study proposes an improved PSO algorithm combined with the A* algorithm, which introduces a nonlinear convergence factor balancing algorithm for global search and local development capabilities in the traditional PSO algorithm, and adopts population initialization to enhance population diversity, so that the improved PSO algorithm has stronger model solving capabilities. This study designs two scenarios for agricultural UAV crop spraying path planning: one without obstacles and one with obstacles. Experimental simulation results show that using the PSO algorithm to solve the obstacle-free problem and then using the A* algorithm to correct the path obstructed by obstacles in the obstacle scenario, the agricultural UAV crop spraying trajectory planning based on the PSO-A* algorithm is real and effective. This research can provide theoretical basis for agricultural plant protection and solve the premise of autonomous operation of UAVs.

647-656

Authors: Ştefania-Adriana HOŢEI, Cristina Ioana MARGHESCU, Rodica Cristina NEGROIU, Andrei DRUMEA

Climate change is having a strong impact on agriculture, and those most affected are small farmers and those practicing subsistence agriculture. Better management of resources is also needed in this context. IoT monitoring tools enable real-time monitoring of crops to make decisions, for example, regarding irrigation. For them to be used by smallholder and subsistence farmers, the system must be inexpensive and easy to use, preferably with interfaces with which the user is already familiar. We wanted to develop a low-cost system with commercially available components and a familiar interface. Since most households in Romania have Internet access or a cell phone with data, data transfer via WiFi was chosen, and Google Sheets was used for data management. For power supply, different methods were tested, from batteries to autonomous systems with solar cells and supercapacitors. The system has successfully passed the first tests and is now being implemented.

667-680

Authors: Petru CARDEI, Nicolae CONSTANTIN, Vergil MURARU, Catalin PERSU, Raluca SFIRU, Daniel LATEŞ

The investigation on the unpredictability of the distribution of traction resistance forces on the working bodies of a specific type of MCLS complex cultivator is presented in the paper. The validation of the random character of the force that loads the active bodies is used to indicate the mathematical model that must be followed for the research of the soil processing system. Also, the research results elucidate some hypotheses issued in the conception and design of the machine: the more intense load for the working bodies from the lines of working bodies located immediately after the tractor, the existence of working bodies that are constantly more intensively requested and the causes. According to the literature, it is to be assumed that the forces that demand the working bodies, the supports, and the machine frame have a random nature. The conclusions of the descriptive, inferential statistical study (which do not quantify the random intensity) are explained together with the results. The experimental loads are compared to some of the most random strings to produce a quantitative estimate of the random intensity. As a result, processes that use random functions and the entirety of their approach are recommended in mathematical modelling for further research

690-702

Authors: Puhang LI, Xinyue ZHANG, Hao ZHANG, Zeyu WANG, Shiwei WEN, Jun CHEN

Aiming at the problems of high damage rate and loss rate of the existing safflower harvesting equipment, this study designed a rotary cutting safflower harvesting end effector by combining the growth characteristics and mechanical properties. Through force analysis of the cutting tool, the key factors, which affects the harvesting performance, were clarified to be the blade inclination and the knife shaft speed. The Fluent software was used to analyze the flow field of the harvesting chamber, which aims to determine the appropriate wind speed. To improve the working performance of the rotary cutting safflower harvesting end effector, a three-factor, three-level orthogonal test was carried out with the blade inclination, knife shaft speed and wind speed as the influencing factors, and with the recovery rate, damage rate and loss rate as the response indexes. A regression model for the three-factor interaction was developed and optimized based on the results of the Box-Behnken test. The optimal parameter combination is: the blade inclination is 15°, the knife shaft speed is 1570 r/min, and the wind speed is 6 m/s. A test of the optimization results showed that the recovery rate was 91.47%, the damage rate was 7.51%, and the loss rate was 4.67%. This study can provide theoretical basis and technical reference for the mechanized harvesting of safflower.

713-724

Authors: Weisong ZHAO, Yongsheng CHEN, Weiqiang LIN, Zhenwei WANG, Qimin GAO, Hu XIE, Biao MA, Mingjiang CHEN, Jingjing FU

In order to study the mechanical properties of compression and stress relaxation of manure under drainage conditions, the experiment was carried out with cattle manure as the object, and the constitutive models were improved to describe the stress-strain curves of compression and stress relaxation. The defined constitutive model was determined by parameter identification, and the influence laws of moisture content and filling mass on the compression and relaxation process were investigated. The results show that the improved Nishihara model and the five-component generalized Maxwell model can better describe the compression and stress relaxation properties of cattle manure, and the coefficients of determination of the parameters of the fitted intrinsic model are all greater than 0.9, with high fitting accuracy. The compression process was divided into three stages: exhaust, drainage, and viscoelastic-plastic deformation. The stress decay rate tended to change quickly and then slowly, and there was a negative correlation between the compressed mass, moisture content, and stress decay rate. Duncan's mean comparisons revealed that the differences in elastic modulus between different moisture content / compressed mass groups in the parameters of the cattle manure compression principal model were all significant (P<0.05). The differences in elastic modulus and coefficient of viscous attenuation between different moisture content groups in the parameters of the stress relaxation model were all significant. The study's results can provide the theoretical basis for the study and simulation of CM's compression and dewatering mechanism and provide support for the solid-liquid separator for livestock and poultry manure.

734-744

Authors: Bai-wei WANG, Gang CHE, Lin WAN, Nai-chen ZHAO, Zhan-nan GUAN

Aiming at the problem of poor uniformity and stability of fertilizer discharge caused by the operation of the fertilizer discharger in the variable fertilization operation of rice. Combined with the agronomic requirements of deep fertilization on the northeast side, an impeller type variable side deep fertilizer was designed. According to the change of the prescription map, change the adjustment factors to achieve reasonable fertilization. Based on EDEM simulation, using the fertilizer discharge stability and uniformity coefficient of variation as indicators, under different impeller blades, different impeller speeds and different fertilizer discharge port angles, a secondary orthogonal rotation combination test was carried out, using Design-Expert. V8.0.6.1 is analyzed and tested, the regression equation and the response surface diagram are obtained, the interaction between the influencing factors is analyzed, and the best combination is determined. It is concluded that the stability and uniformity coefficient of variation of fertilizer discharge have reached the quality evaluation index of fertilization machinery According to technical specifications, the coefficient of variation of stability is 0.67%~2.85%, and the coefficient of variation of uniformity is 2.7%~16.4%. When the number of blades is 6, the fan angle of the fertilizer outlet is 35.7°, and the impeller speed is 18.85 r·min-1, the minimum variation coefficient of stability is 0.67%, and the minimum variation coefficient of uniformity is 2.1%. The bench test results are basically consistent with the optimal combination of simulation, and meet the design requirements.

755-764

Authors: Junhui SUN, Jinliang GONG, Yanfei ZHANG

In order to solve the problem of poor flexibility of existing picking manipulators, a picking manipulator with a wrist joint has been designed, the wrist is capable of rotating 45° forward and backward around the x and y axes. Firstly, ANSYS was used to simulate the performance of different hoses under different conditions, and finally a 4*6 mm PVC hose was selected to replace the internal cardan joint as the transmission component. Secondly, the wrist structure was optimised using genetic algorithm to reduce the tendon rope variation differences to 0.31 mm and 0.24 mm. Finally, the results of orchard picking experiments indicate that the end-effector rotation of 720° can ensure that the fruit stalks can be unscrewed, the time required to complete the picking is 1.6 s, and the overall picking success rate was 100%. After 9 days of placing the harvested fruit, both the flesh and skin are intact, indicating that the manipulators can complete the non-destructive picking operation.

776-784

Authors: Christos I. DIMITRIADIS, Dimitrios KATERIS, Panagiotis XYRADAKIS, Aspasia GIALAMA, Theodoros GIALAMAS

Operator fatigue during work with agricultural machinery is a significant factor contributing to fatal accidents in Greece. Workers operating agricultural machinery, especially those working with tractors and off-road machines, constitute one of the most hazard-prone groups due to mechanical vibrations transmitted from the ground to the operators’ seats. Operators of tractors and off-road machines are exposed to intense mechanical vibrations, underscoring the importance of cumulatively calculating permitted working hours. This work presents a study that was conducted at the Laboratory of Safety and Ergonomics of Agricultural Machinery, Department of Agriculture – Agrotechnology, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Thessaly, in order to evaluate the vibrations generated when operators work with agricultural tractors and off-road machinery. The results of the study showed that the highest levels of vibration occurred during disc harrowing operation, particularly when the disc harrow moved vertically or at an angle of 30° to the ploughing direction. For seed bed preparation, it is recommended to use tractors equipped with a suspension system for the operator's cabin and a seat with an adjustable range of perceived vibration. Additionally, to prevent fatigue or health problems for tractor operators, it is advisable to limit permitted working hours to fewer than 8 hours per day.

798-807

Authors: Iulian VOICEA, Petru CÂRDEI, Vlad-Nicolae ARSENOAIA, Nicoleta UNGUREANU, Florin NENCIU, Nicoleta VANGHELE

The paper proposes a statistical method for assessing the impact of multiple nutritional recipes on fish growth, raised in polyculture systems, a useful tool in selecting diets within small and medium-sized farms. After designing an experimental installation that produces pelletized feed, the study investigated the associations dependent on the feeder composition for three fish species involved in the experiment (Cyprinus carpio, Hypophthalmichthys nobilis and Carassius carassius). The fish relative mass and size variations have been used as performance parameters. The authors also issued hypotheses on the relations created between the studied species and determined the Feed Conversion Ratio.

818-833

Authors: Volodymyr BULGAKOV, Hryhorij KALETNІK, Oleksandra TROKHANIAK, Svitlana LUTKOVSKA, Mykola KLENDII, Semjons IVANOVS, Lucretia POPA, Vitalii YAROPUD

Restoration of the soil fertility is an important task for scientists and practitioners. Based on the constructed mathematical model of the surface of a screw-type working body, rotating around a fixed horizontal axis, there are determined the work and power of penetration of the screw-type working body into the soil, loosening the soil and overcoming the soil friction. It has been established that the cutting power is proportional to the square root of deepening of the working body (а1/2), and the radius of the working body (R1/2) is directly proportional to the speed of the unit V. On the basis of a complex of experimental studies, regression dependencies were derived to determine the traction resistance when cultivating the soil with a harrow, equipped with screw-type working bodies. It has been found that the dominant impact upon the value of the traction resistance Рх is exerted by the depth of tillage h, then by the angle of attack β of the battery of the screw-type working bodies, but the least impact is made by the change in the speed of the harrow V. The difference between the calculated and the experimental values of the traction resistance ranges from 9.6...11.2%.

843-856

Authors: Valentin VLĂDUŢ, Sorin-Ștefan BIRIŞ, Gigel PARASCHIV, Nicoleta UNGUREANU, Sorin Tiberiu BUNGESCU, Iulian VOICEA, Dan CUJBESCU, Iuliana GĂGEANU, Evelin LAZA, Lorena-Diana POPA, Gheorghe MATEI, Atanas ATANASOV

Vibrations are part of the category of dynamic phenomena and are manifested in some medium as a consequence of an external excitation in the form of oscillations. These oscillations have negative effects on the medium in which they manifest. In the particular case where the medium is represented by the human body, the negative effects are felt at the level of its health, and the consequences are sometimes irreversible. In this context, it is necessary to study and know the effects that vibrations have on the human body. The main purpose of researches carried out in this field is to establish the limit up to which man can work in medium that generate vibrations, without the vibrations affecting his state of health.

865-881

Authors: Guoli HAN, Shuming MA

In today's increasingly accelerating globalization, environmental protection and sustainable development have become the focus of common concern for all countries. Public environmental awareness, that is, the public's understanding and attitude towards environmental issues, has a significant impact on environmental protection work. Meanwhile, with the rise of green product trade, the market trading of green products is becoming increasingly active. As one of the means to regulate the relationship between public environmental awareness and green product trade, the role of policies and legal texts is increasingly prominent. This article will explore the relationship between public environmental awareness and green product trade and analyze the regulatory role of policies and legal texts in it. This article explores the impact of trade and environmental policies on the financial system through computer software. It constructs a theoretical hypothesis model to explore the moderating effect of policy and legal texts on the relationship between public emotional perception of environmental policies and green product trade. After empirical testing, all research hypotheses in this study have been supported. The results showed that at a test level of 0.01, consumers' perception of green efficacy, perceived green responsibility, green purchasing behavior, emotional arousal, and moderate values were significantly positively correlated. Among them, the R-value of perceived green efficiency and green purchasing behavior is 0.701, and the R-value of perceived green responsibility and green purchasing behavior is 0.638, indicating the degree of correlation between perceived green efficiency, perceived green responsibility, and green purchasing behavior. Green purchasing behavior is highly correlated. The conclusion indicates that the government has further increased export subsidies for the clean industry, implemented differentiated environmental tax policies, and emphasized the coordinated use of procedures, promoting the development of the clean industry and the upgrading of industrial structure.

891-903

Authors: Vasilica ȘTEFAN, Radu CIUPARCĂ, Emil TUDOR, Mihai MATACHE, Ionuț VASILE, Ion Cătălin SBURLAN, Ana ZAICA

The article presents the results obtained from experimental research conducted with an electric equipment (a watercraft) for harvesting aquatic biomass (reed, cattail, water lily, etc.), remote controlled, symbolized as ERBA. This equipment was designed and built in Romania by researchers from INMA Bucharest and ICPE-CA, at the level of experimental model. The purpose of this equipment is to develop a national system of machines for cleaning lakes, navigable canals, and specific areas of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve from excess biomass that needs to be removed for the proper functioning of aquatic ecosystems. The harvested biomass is used as raw material for the production of liquid and gaseous fuels, as well as biofertilizers, which can be utilized as inputs in the bioeconomy. The phenological characteristics of the harvested biomass, the structural and functional characteristics of the vessel, the laboratory experimental records, the nautical indices, the exploitation indices, and the energy consumption were measured under different working conditions and regimes, and with different types of biomass.

21-36

Authors: Ping ZHAO, Tiankuo YU, Guofa XU, Ruijin GUO, He LI, Hongfei XU, Tianci JIN, Dong JI

Taking into account the physicochemical properties of soil and the complexity of adhesion interface, how to improve the soil adhesion on the mechanical surface is a crucial technical issue. In order to lower the increasing resistance caused by soil adhesion on the surface of a digging shovel in potato harvesting, a potato digging shovel with a non-smooth surface structure was designed based on bionics theory. Based on testing physical and mechanical properties of soil, a soil groove model corresponding to soil physical properties and particle model physical properties was established through a combination of simulation and physical tests, and a simulation test for evaluating the drag reduction performance was conducted. The simulation comparison test results show that the performance of the bionic digging shovel is better than that of the traditional potato digging shovel, regardless of whether the broken soil rate or the working resistance is reduced, and the soil adhered to the mechanical surface can be effectively reduced by 93.3%. The research results can provide ideas and methods for solving the adhesion problem between machinery and soil.

46-56

Authors: Junming HOU, Zhaotan REN, Hongjie ZHU, Zhi RENDE, Wei WANG

Castor is one of the important oil crop, the shelling process of which directly affects the quality of castor seeds. In the process of shelling, the shelling force of castor is an important index to study its damage. The castor capsule model was established and the shelling test machine was established based on the discrete element method. Then the extrusion law of castor capsule during shelling was analyzed. The shelling process is divided into three stages, which are the Initial stage, stable shelling stage and the final stage. The force law of shelling process is analyzed. The results show that with the increase of rotating speed, the maximum force decreases from 68.78 to 68.10 N, the maximum speed increases from 8.92 to 12.99 m/s, the force of inner drum increases from 509.34 to 533.14 N, and then decreases to 456.15 N. The shelling increases from 91.23% to 91.28%, and then decreases to 88.89%. With the increase of filling amount, the maximum force increases from 55.86 to 76.93 N, the maximum speed decreases from 12.99 to 10.86 m/s, the force of inner drum increases from 338.58 to 603.364 N, and the shelling rate changes from 91% to 90.05%. This study can provide theoretical support for the design of castor shelling machine.

66-75

Authors: Andrés Rodríguez Toscano, Rafael Ramirez, José M. Sánchez

This research presents a thermodynamic analysis of a Thermal LTC-10 single-effect absorption series cooling system using the water/LiBr pair. Four operating scenarios were modeled on an hourly basis (24h) with EES software using mass and energy balances and the environmental conditions of the city of Barranquilla, Colombia. The analysis of the results shows that the system powered only by solar energy obtains the highest COP between 8:00 and 16:00 hours and the lowest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while the system powered by rice husk biogas presents stable operation throughout the day and higher SO2eq emissions.

86-95

Authors: Hongwen YAN, Zhiwei HU, Yiran LIU

To explore the application of traditional machine learning model in the intelligent management of pigs, in this paper, the influence of the PCA pre-treatment on pig face identification with KNN is studied. With testing method, individual identification test was carried out on 10 different pigs in two testing schemes, in which one adopted KNN alone and the other adopted PCA + KNN, for which the classifier parameter was taken as 3 and 5, respectively. In the optimized scheme, the operating efficiency got significantly increased, also the training time and testing time were reduced to 4.8% and 7% of the original value in the KNN alone scheme, though the accuracy got lowered to a certain extent. With all these factors taken into consideration, PCA pre-treatment is beneficial to individual pig identification with KNN. It can provide experimental support for mobile terminals and embedded application of KNN classifiers.

107-116

Authors: Bin WANG, Hua YANG, Lili LI

In order to realize the rapid and accurate identification of different maturity of Cerasus humilis fruit, this study explored the nondestructive testing method of Cerasus Humilis fruit maturity based on hyperspectral imaging technology. The hyperspectral data of 320 samples of Cerasus humilis fruit were collected by using a hyperspectral imaging system in the range of 895~1700 nm. By comparing the prediction accuracy of the partial least squares (PLS) model established by four preprocessing methods, the competitive adaptive reweighted algorithm (CARS), successive projection algorithm (SPA), and random frog (RF) were used to extract characteristic wavelengths, and partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) discriminant models were established. The results showed that the SPA-LS-SVM model had the highest discrimination accuracy for the four types of maturity samples, and the discrimination accuracy of the correction set and prediction set were 85.00% and 87.50%, respectively. This study provides a theoretical reference for the rapid and nondestructive testing of the maturity of Cerasus Humilis fruit by hyperspectral imaging technology.

127-136

Authors: Jingxin SUN, Liqin YANG, Baohui XU, Yuming GUO

In order to meet the precision seeding of small seeds including millet and broomcorn millet in hilly and mountainous areas, a single-row small grain precision seeder was developed. Static seeding test and seeding test were carried out on the seeder. In this paper, the key parts such as socket wheel-ring groove seed metering device, transmission system and tensioning wheel are designed. The working parts such as arrow shovel furrow opener, plastic seed tube and hollow cast iron press wheel were selected to achieve seed metering. The seed metering wheel has double-row of holes. The results of static seeding test showed that rotational speed had a significant effect on the sowing quantity of millet and broomcorn millet (P < 0.001). The higher the rotational speed, the greater the sowing quantity. With the increase of rotational speed of seed metering wheel, the damage rate of millet and broomcorn millet increased. At the same rotational speed, the breakage rate of broomcorn millet is smaller than that of millet. The field sowing test showed that when the seeder is at a marching speed of about 0.5 m/s, the qualified rate of the hole spacing of millet and broomcorn millet is greater than or equal to 90%, and the qualified rate of the number of grains per hole is greater than or equal to 82%. All indicators meet the requirements of the technical conditions of single-grain (precision) seeder. The design can provide reference for the design and optimization of small grain precision seeder.

147-154

Authors: Mariana- Gabriela MUNTEANU, Gheorghe VOICU, Gabriel-Alexandru CONSTANTIN, Elena –Mădălina STEFAN, Paula TUDOR, Mihaela NITU

This paper presents an analysis of the variation of energy consumption in the lamination and drawing process of bagel doughs. Also, the paper highlights the farinographic characteristics (water absorbtion, dough develpomnet time, dough stability, degree of dough softening and farinographic index) of the floour used for the dough preparation for which the energy consumption during lamination and drawing was determined

165-172

Authors: Wenhao DOU, Sanmin SUN, Pengxiang XU

This paper evaluates linear regression analysis, BP neural network, and a random forest prediction model for the prediction of jujube water demand. The results highlight that the R2 of the random forest is 0.941 and the residual distribution is the most stable. Hence, the random forest is more suitable for prediction, and therefore, an intelligent irrigation system is established employing random forest, where the cloud server is the upper computer and a Raspberry Pi is the lower computer, and at the same time, a PC and a mobile interface was built to present various information about the developed irrigation system.

181-190

Authors: Juan LIU, Zhuoyu YAN, Mingze XU, Yudi LIU, XueWei BAI, Yonghai XIU, DeSheng WEI

Coconut coir dust and corn stover powder were taken as raw biomass materials for pellet production, using four uni-axial compression set-ups, to explore the influence of the diameter of the inner hole diameter of the cylinder, the depth in compression , and the depth remained in compaction on the pellet density. Sample of pellets produced at the force steady phase, the maximum pellet density of the coconut coir dust material is 1.53 g/cm3 (1530 kg/m3), and 1.23 g/cm3 (1230 kg/m3) of the corn stalk powder pellets are obtained, At the same time, in the process of the test, Failure to compress the two biomass raw materials into pellets also occurred, indicating that the compression parameters studied in the experiment had a significant impact on the pellet quality. On the basis of the obtained pelleting test data, taking into account the nonlinear characteristics between pellet density and processing parameters involved, the adaptive neuro-fuzzy influence system(ANFIS) method was used to predict the pellet density of coconut coir dust and corn stover powder. The results show that the method is effective for predicting the density of biomass particles.

201-210

Authors: Tomasz ŻELAZIŃSKI, Adam EKIELSKI, Karol DURCZAK, Magdalena MORAWSKA

The paper presents the results of research on film biocomposites made of thermoplastic starch (TPS) and various types of nut shells. The research involved the use of thermally treated nut shells: hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts and peanuts. TPS biocomposites were produced by the pour method using non-adherent moulds. The obtained samples were used to test the basic physical properties used in testing biodegradable materials. The following parameters were determined: mechanical strength, colour and colour difference, water contact angle, moisture absorption from water and atmospheric air. Images of biocomposite fractures were also taken using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). It was found that the addition of nut shells enabled the production of homogeneous materials and contributed to the improvement of their strength parameters. The research showed that nut shells can be a prospective raw material for the production of innovative biodegradable materials.

221-231

Authors: Xin WANG, Guohai ZHANG, Jia YAO, Jitan LIAN, Xining YANG

The corn grain harvester serves as an example of complex farming machinery with a condition monitoring system that collects a lot of working condition data, making it challenging to identify the true change pattern due to the data coming from the equipment in various states. Firstly, the overall structure of the corn grain harvester is analyzed, and the common causes and mechanisms of corn grain harvester failures are analyzed, leading to the cutting table as the main research object; Secondly, by collecting historical failure data of corn grain harvester as well as real-time failure information for collation and pre-processing, eliminating interference such as noise and missing data, establishing a failure matrix, extracting internal characteristics between failure causes and establishing a mapping between failure causes and failure phenomena; Finally, the future failure phenomena of the corn grain harvester are predicted according to different failure causes. The simulation analysis results show that the self-coding neural network fault prediction model can better predict the occurrence probability and types of faults and provide data support for fault maintenance and decision making of agricultural machinery.

239-250

Authors: Qichao LI, Jinlong FENG, Xianglan MING

In order to improve the opener of the seeder and its lightweight structure, a new type of opener is designed. The overall structure and working principle of a single-ditch double-row opener are analyzed, and the structural parameters of machete cutting soil and the soil guide board are designed and optimized. Using the penetration angle of machete cutting soil and the included angle of the soil guide board as test factors, field experiments were conducted. As the test indexes, the working resistance, the sowing coefficient of variation, and the depth coefficient of variation were used to analyze the effect of the opener. The results showed that in terms of working resistance, the penetration angle of the machete cutting edge and the included angle of the soil guide board were extremely significant, and the included angle was greater than the penetration angle regarding the influence degree. In terms of the sowing coefficient of variation, the penetration angle was significant, and the included angle was extremely significant. Regarding the depth coefficient of variation, the penetration angle was extremely significant, and the included angle of the guide soil board was significant. Based on the optimization analysis by using the Design Expert 8.0.6, it is found that the performance of the opener is optimal when the penetration angle and the included angle are 50.03° and 42.36°, respectively. The working resistance, the sowing coefficient of variation, and the depth coefficient of variation are 61.47N, 6.49% and 4.22%, respectively. After verification, the results are basically consistent, and the seeding and trenching performance meets the agronomic requirements. This study can provide a basis and technical reference for the design and development of the ditching technology and opener.

265-274

Authors: Yun LIU, Weiran LV, Lihong LI, Bing XU, Decong ZHENG, Qi LU

In order to fully explore the influence of different pressure methods on the growth characteristics of buckwheat, a pressure test device with adjustable press force, and easy to replace the press wheel was designed. Using the dry matter quality of buckwheat roots, stems, leaves at seedling stage, plant height, number of main stem nodes, number of main stem branches, grain number per plant, grain weight per plant, and yield as evaluation indexes, single factor test on press force was carried out, and three-factor and three-level orthogonal test was carried out too with press wheel outer diameter, press force and press wheel type as factors. The results showed that the index values of buckwheat showed a trend of first increasing and then decreasing with the increase of press force. When the press force was 450 N, the growth and development of buckwheat performed best. The effects of press wheel outer diameter, press force, and press wheel type on growth characteristics of buckwheat was different. The effects of press force and press wheel type on the indexes were greater than that of press wheel outer diameter. The optimal pressure methods of buckwheat sowing are as follows: the press wheel outer diameter is 300 mm, the press force is 450 N, and the press wheel type is conical combined wheel. The results of this study could provide reference for the improvement of high-yield mechanized sowing technology of buckwheat and the design of rational pressure device.

287-298

Authors: Tianhua LI, Siqi ZHANG, Chaofan ZHANG, Guanshan ZHANG, Min WEI, Hongen GUO, Guoying SHI

This paper proposes a fertilizer mixing device that combines pressure relief return and mechanical agitation to address the issues in the current water-fertilizer integration equipment related to limited fertilizer mixing methods and inconvenient irrigation pressure regulation. The device employs different mixing modes for various fertilizer forms and uses pressure relief return to adjust irrigation pressure, thereby enhancing the efficiency of water-fertilizer mixing and optimizing energy consumption. The experimental results indicate that the reflux mode is suitable for liquid-type fertilizers which are fast dissolving and easy to diffuse, and its EC value is stable at about 6.60 mS/cm, which is close to the calibrated value of 6.80 mS/cm. The stirring paddle mode compensates for the reflux mode's weak mixing effect, making it suitable for solid powder-type fertilizers' mixing operation. The EC value remains stable at approximately 8.60 mS/cm when calibrated at 8.70 mS/cm. The “stirring paddle + two-way reflux” mode demonstrates the most robust mixing effect and is suitable for mixing solid granular fertilizers. When calibrated at 8.20 mS/cm, it stabilizes at approximately the calibration value after 105 s. This research provides technical support and a theoretical basis to accomplish efficient, energy-saving, and rational application of water-fertilizer integration across diverse fertilizer forms.

309-319

Authors: Huang TIANYI, Florentina BADEA, Xiao MAOHUA, Zhao SHANHU, Sorin-Ionut BADEA, Cristian-Radu BADEA

In order to solve the real-time obstacle avoidance problem in electric tractor operation, an improved dynamic window approach (DWA) based on optimal energy consumption is proposed for electric tractor obstacle avoidance. Firstly, energy consumption model of tractor is established based on the transmission system of electric tractor, then energy consumption evaluation sub-function is introduced to improve the evaluation function of original DWA algorithm, and finally, the trajectory is evaluated and the optimal solution of the trajectory is determined by using new evaluation function. Based on the kinematics model of YL254ET electric tractor in Yancheng Yueda, a model predictive controller is designed. The obstacle avoidance planning and tracking control of electric tractor are simulated jointly on Simulink and CarSim simulation platform. Finally, the obstacle avoidance planning test is carried out. The simulation and experimental results show that after the algorithm improvement, the energy consumption of electric tractors is reduced, the generated path is smoother, and the lateral error is smaller.

328-336

Authors: Bing XU, Qingliang CUI, Decong ZHENG

Aiming at the poor efficiency in crushing a handful of caking organic fertilizers spraying from the traditional disc spreader, an improved disc spreader equipped with spike-tooth crushing unit was designed with the introduction of its structural composition and working principle. Also simulation experiments were carried out based on the discrete element method according to the solutions made before and after the structural improvement. Firstly, a granular organic fertilizer model was established based on the EDEM and a caking organic fertilizer bonding model was built based on the HMB (Hertz-Mindlin with bonding) contact model. Then two organic fertilizer spreading models corresponding to the solutions were respectively established, based on which simulation experiments were repeated three times on the spreading process. The analysis on the particle velocity vector diagram revealed the interaction relationship between organic fertilizers with the toothed shaft, external wall and disk, verifying the crushing mechanism of crushing unit. By calculating the total number of the bonds generated and broken in the spreading process in both of the spreading models, the average broken rate of bonds in the spreading process was separately 58.87% and 98.05% based on each solution, revealing that the improved solution outperformed the traditional solution in terms of the efficiency in crushing the caking organic fertilizers. This research will be a reference in designing the critical components or improving the overall performance of disc spreader.

350-358

Authors: Volodymyr BULGAKOV, Semjons IVANOVS, Volodymyr KUVACHОV, Lucretia POPA, Igor SIVAK, Oleksandra TROKHANIAK, Yevhen IHNATIEV

An important operational indicator of agricultural machine-tractor units is the smoothness of movement, which significantly affects the traction and dynamic performance of their work, productivity, agronomic qualities of the operation, traffic safety, durability and efficiency. As a rule, it is evaluated by the influence of oscillations (translational vertical, transverse, angular longitudinal, etc.), on these indicators, as well as on the physical condition and health of operators who control these units in real production conditions. This article presents an improved method and results of experimental assessment of the smoothness of the movement of the modular agricultural unit, which moves in the footsteps of a constant technological track. Studies of the smoothness of the modular unit showed that the graphs of normalized correlation functions of vertical oscillations of the modular agricultural tool developed by us in its motion in the wake of a constant techno-logical track is characterized by a function containing along with random components harmonic, which are expressed by attenuating periodic oscillations. The range of frequencies of oscillations of the frame of the agricultural tool is concentrated in the range from 0 tо 20 s−1, which is consistent with the frequency range 0…0.3 s−1 in which the variances of oscillations of inequalities of a profile of traces of a technological track are concentrated. Studies have confirmed the effectiveness of the method of estimating the intensity of vertical oscillations of the agricultural unit measuring and recording system based on a tablet computer with Android operating system with built-in accelerometer sensors and Accelerometer Meter application. The developed technique of mathematical modelling and experimental determination of vertical oscillations of the machine-tractor unit can be used in the study of the dynamics of other agricultural machines and units.

369-378

Authors: Changqing LIU, Jinheng GU, Xin DU, Chengwen LIU, Yuefeng DU, Enrong MAO

The accuracy of tractor plowing is an important link to ensure the quality of agricultural crops. The integrated control of draft-position in plowing is an effective plowing precision control technology which can be used to improve the tractor's plowing efficiency. The hydraulic system of the tractor hitch has the characteristics of large load and complex working environment. A differential and integral sliding mode adaptive controller (DI-SMAC) is designed for the tractor hitch hydraulic system with strong nonlinearity, uncertainty and time-varying parameters. Compared with the traditional PID controller, integral sliding mode adaptive controller(I-SMAC) and differential and integral sliding mode adaptive controller(DI-SMAC) in the electro-hydraulic hitch control system, the numerical simulation verifies the advantages of the differential and integral sliding mode adaptive controller. The real test platform of the agricultural tractor is built. The test results show that the DI-SMAC can realize the integrated control function of draft-position. In the position control mode, there is no static error, and the anti-interference ability is strong; Under the draft control mode, compared with the traditional PID controller, the range of traction error of differential and integral sliding mode controller is reduced by 32.9%, and the standard deviation is reduced by 38.6%; When the weight coefficient is changed, the traction force and tillage depth fluctuation are different with different weight coefficients. It shows that the DI-SMAC is stable and effective, and the developed method is expected to provide technical support for the fine plowing operation of tractors.

391-400

Authors: Xin DU, Changqing LIU, Xuhui LI, Wei ZHU, Qixin SUN, Shufa CHEN

To ensure accurate and consistent fertilizer application, the key component of the fertilizer feeding device, the grooved wheel, was designed and theoretically analyzed, and the number of grooves of the fertilizer wheel was determined to be 9. The effects of grooves inclination angle, grooves length and operating speed on the fertilizer feeding performance were analyzed by single-factor tests, and the appropriate range of factors was determined. The effect of the interaction between groove length and operating speed on the amount of fertilizer discharged from the groove was investigated by a full factorial test, and a quadratic regression was fitted to the test results to establish the regression equations of groove length and operating speed on the average fertilizer application per groove and the coefficient of variation of the average fertilizer application per groove, which can be used to predict the average fertilizer application per groove and the coefficient of variation of the average fertilizer application per groove to solve for groove length and operating speed.

415-422

Authors: Dimitar GEORGIEV, Galina DINEVA, Dimitar KARASTOYANOV, Kancho PEYCHEV, Vania DIMOVA

The hourly productivity of the milking parlour is significantly influenced by the organization of the technological process. Milkers perform a series of sequential operations (entry on the platforms, washing, drying, placing the milking units, removing them, disinfecting the teats, exiting the platforms of the milking parlour) the duration of which is a large part of the total milking time. The duration of the latent period from the release of oxytocin to its contact with the myoepithelial cells in the glandular part of the udder is from 30 s to 90 s (average 60 s). In this line of thought, the following questions arise: "in what time interval should the preparatory operations for milking be performed and what is their permissible duration". The aim of the present study is to develop methodologies (models) for simulating the work of milkers in "Parallel" type parlours. It was found that under the initially set working conditions of only two milkers in the milking parlour, all developed models are applicable for capacities up to 2x8. Models II, III and IV are unacceptable for capacities above 2x8, as the total duration of preparation of milking cows exceeds the time frame by between 30-80%. This finding proves that for a capacity over 2x8 it is necessary to perform technological operations with a larger number of milkers.

431-440

Authors: Shibang MA, Ailing GUO

Soluble solid content (SSC) is a major quality index of kiwifruits. Visible near-infrared (Vis/NIR) hyperspectral imaging with the genetic algorithm (GA) was adopted in this study to realize the non-destructive prediction of kiwifruit SSC. A laboratory Vis/NIR hyperspectral imaging system was established to collect the hyperspectral imaging of 120 kiwifruit samples at a range of 400–1100 nm. The average reflectance spectral data of the region of interest of the kiwifruit hyperspectral imaging were obtained after different preprocessing method, namely, Savitzky–Golay smoothing (SG), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), and their combination method. The prediction models of partial least squares regression, multiple linear regression, and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) were built for determining kiwifruit SSC by using the average reflectance spectral data and effective feature wavelength variables selected by GA, respectively. The results show that SG+MSC is the best preprocessing method. The precisions of the prediction models built using the effective feature wavelength variables selected by GA are higher than that established using full average reflectance spectral data. The GA-LS-SVM prediction model has a best performance with correlation coefficient for prediction (R=0.932) and standard error of prediction (SEP=0.536° Bx) for predicting kiwifruit SSC. The prediction accuracy has been improved by 5.6% compared with that of the prediction models established by using the full-band reflectance spectral data. This study provides an effective method for non-destructive detection of kiwifruit SSC.

455-467

Authors: Zhen WANG, Keqing QIAN, Xiaoli ZHU, Xinyu HU, Xinran LI

With the rapid development of agricultural machinery intelligence and informatization, agricultural robots are becoming the protagonist, promoting standardized production in agriculture, improving efficiency, and reducing labor costs. However, how to quickly plan an efficient and safe path for agricultural transport robots is currently a hot topic in path planning research. In this study, the path optimization problem of agricultural robots handling agricultural products (such as Edible Fungi) in and out of warehouses, which served as the study object, was solved. First, the number of agricultural handling robots was initialized based on the scanning method, and the geometric center of sub-path nodes was set as the virtual node. Secondly, the optimal path of the virtual node was solved using the improved ant colony algorithm embedded with a genetic operator, and the optimal result of sub-paths was acquired. Thirdly, the optimal solution meeting constraint conditions was obtained with the launch cost, transportation cost, and time cost of agricultural robots as objective functions. Lastly, the effectiveness of the optimization model and the improved ant colony algorithm was verified through the instance analysis. This study is of certain significance to the ex-warehousing path optimization of agricultural robots under the sustainable development concept of agricultural automation.

477-486

Authors: Muhammad Nashir EFFENDY, Siti NURHASANAH, Asri WIDYASANTI

Desiccated Coconut (DC) is a product rich in fat, protein, carbohydrates and fiber. It is widely used as an additive for the snack industry. As a potential food additive product, every process needs to be considered to produce a good quality DC. The effort to maintain the quality of DC is to optimize the main process of making DC, namely the drying process. In several studies, the drying condition of DC was carried out differently, that is why an optimization process on DC drying is needed. This study aims to determine the temperature and drying time combination that produces DC with the optimum moisture content, fat content, and yield. The drying process used a food dehydrator with a temperature combination of 50°C to 70°C and a time of 2 to 4 hours. The research method used was a laboratory experimental method with Response Surface Methodology (RSM) optimization using Central Composite Design (CCD). It was presented that the optimum drying conditions given by RSM were obtained by drying at 70°C for 2 hours. The results obtained from the validation of a water content of 1.279% wet basis (wb), a fat content of 64.855% wb, and a yield of 42.363%, were following CODEX STAN 177-1991. Based on this study, it can be concluded that the combination of temperature and drying time affects moisture content, fat content, and DC yield.

497-506

Authors: Man CHEN, Gong CHENG, Jinshan XU, Guangyue ZHANG, Chengqian JIN

In this study, an online detection system of soybean crushed rate and impurity rate based on DeepLabV3+model was constructed. Three feature extraction networks, namely the MobileNetV2, Xception-65, and ResNet-50 models, were adopted to obtain the best DeepLabV3+model through test analysis. Two well-established semantic segmentation networks, the improved U-Net and PSPNet, are used for mechanically harvested soybean image recognition and segmentation, and their performances are compared with the DeepLabV3+ model’s performance. The results show that, of all the models, the improved U-Net has the best segmentation performance, achieving a mean intersection over union (FMIOU) value of 0.8326. The segmentation performance of the DeepLabV3+ model using the MobileNetV2 is similar to that of the U-Net, achieving FMIOU of 0.8180. The DeepLabV3+ model using the MobileNetV2 has a fast segmentation speed of 168.6 ms per image. Taking manual detection results as a benchmark, the maximum absolute and relative errors of the impurity rate of the detection system based on the DeepLabV3+ model with the MobileNetV2 of mechanized soybean harvesting operation are 0.06% and 8.11%, respectively. The maximum absolute and relative errors of the crushed rate of the same system are 0.34% and 9.53%, respectively.

517-526

Authors: Tiangang HOU, Zhenyu WANG, Mingce ZHAO, Cuihong LIU, Mingjin XIN, Liyan WU, Benhua ZHANG

In this study, the effects of different electric field parameters on the germination characteristics of aged rice seeds were determined via low-frequency high-voltage pulsed electric field (LH-PEF) treatment. The Design-Expert software was used to design a rotating combination test, and response surface analysis was used to optimize five germination characteristics of rice seeds. The optimal treatment voltage was 13 kV and the optimal treatment time was 32.72 min. The results show that, under the optimal treatment conditions (P<0.01), the germination potential (GE), germination rate (GP), germination index (GI), vitality index (VI) and high vitality ratio (HVR) of the aged rice seeds increased by 23.7%, 17.7%, 43.2%, 59.7%, and 250%, respectively, compared to the control. The pulsed electric field’s biological effect on the aged rice seeds was the most significant when the optimal treatment parameters were used. The results of this study provide a reliable reference for the parameter optimization of high-voltage electric field treatment of crop seeds.

539-548

Authors: Fazheng WANG, Yaoming LI, Yanbin LIU, Kuizhou JI, Zeng LI, Xiangqian XU, Lei XU

In view of the fact that the threshing gap of combine harvester can only be controlled by adjusting gravure screen and it is time-consuming and laboring, a kind of variable-diameter threshing drum with movable radial plates is developed by changing the diameter of threshing drum to adjust the threshing gap concentrically. All parts of the threshing drum were designed and checked by mechanical design principle, and the statics and modal analysis of the whole structure were carried out by ANSYS Workbench. The results show that the maximum deformation of the variable-diameter threshing drum with movable radial plates is 0.29 mm under boundary conditions. The maximum allowable deformation of the threshing drum in use is 3 mm, which meets the requirements of use. The equivalent stress of the threshing drum with variable diameter is up to 100 MPa, which is less than the yield strength of the material, and will not cause structural damage. According to the modal analysis, the natural frequency of the threshing drum does not cause resonance phenomenon. The field test of wheat was carried out after the processing of the variable-diameter threshing drum with movable radial plates was installed, and the working performance was compared with that of the ordinary drum. The results showed that the threshing performance was the best when the forward speed was 1 m/s, the grain entrainment loss rate was 0.53%, and the grain un-threshed rate was 0.065%. The grain breakage rate is 0.54%, and the performance is more than 50% higher than that of ordinary rollers. It lays a foundation for the adaptive adjustment of threshing gap in combine harvester.

557-559

Authors: Xianmin LIANG, Xiangcai ZHANG, Xingcheng AN, Meng LIU, Xianliang WANG, Zhongcai WEI, Xiupei CHENG, Hui LI

An active-action seeding depth automatic control system was designed , with the purpose of effectively ensure the consistency and stability of the seeding depth when the seeder is operated in the field. Strain-gauge pressure sensor was used in the system, which can detect the force on the tip of the furrow opener in the soil in real time, proceed to the next step judge the change of the seeding depth in the soil according to the change of the pressure signal. In order to achieve consistency and stability of seeding depth, the control signal formation circuit will send a control signal when the pressure on the tip of furrow opener exceeds the appropriate pressure range, and the motor will be controlled to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise to drive the rack and pinion movement to realize the vertical lift of the furrow opener, so that the force on the tip of furrow opener in the soil remains within the appropriate range. The test results indicate that the seeding depth adjustment device based on the tip of furrow opener force measurement has stable and reliable control performance for controlling the seeding depth with an average seeding depth qualification rate of 94.56% and an average seeding depth variation coefficient of only 9.29%, which greatly ensures the consistency and stability of the seeding depth under the condition that the seeding depth is 30-70mm and the working speed is 3-7km/h.

583-592

Authors: Valerian CEREMPEI, Eduard BANARI, Gheorghe POȘTARU, Lucreţia POPA

In the given article, the results of the tribological research of the chrome-gray cast iron coupling are presented, the friction conditions between the cylinder liner and the compression segment being lubricated in various environments are modeled: diesel (control), pure biodiesel B100 and biodiesel-diesel B20 mixture. It was established that the average values of the coefficient of friction in the chrome-gray cast iron coupling, in the case of using biofuels B20, B100 as the lubricating material, are higher in relation to diesel fuel: by 15.6% for B20 and, respectively, by 23.3% for B100. The values of the total wear of the tribological coupling decreased, in relation to diesel, by 36.8% in the case of lubrication with B20 and by 39.5% - with B100.

607-614

Authors: Oana-Diana CRISTEA, Mihaela NITU, Gabriel CONSTANTIN, Mariana MUNTEANU, Oana-Elena MILEA, Roxana ZAHARIA, Marga GRADILA

The working process of the threshing apparatus is characterized by the qualitative working indices they achieve during operation. In order to maximize them with effect on reducing the percentage of seed losses, damaged seeds and impurities in the seed mass, respectively increasing the percentage of separated seeds, certain adjustments can be made on the component elements of a threshing apparatus in accordance with the type, quality and the condition of the material subjected to the threshing operation. In this paper, a n axial flow threshing apparatus was tested under different conditions, in order to be able to obtain the data necessary to adjust the working parameters, which would allow it to be operated at the desired quality indices (losses, injuries and minimal impurities together with separation of seeds from ears and straw almost completely).

21-34

Authors: Zheng WANG, Qingfu GONG, Fade LI, Ang GAO, Longlong REN, Yuepeng SONG

In order to improve the level of forage harvester automation and reduce damage, blockage and efficiency, based on the principle of minimum energy, fuzzy prediction theory and external characteristics of power, the mathematical model of the whole machine and each operating unit is established, and a set of forage harvester operating load adaptive feedback control system is designed; in order to make the power more scientifically and effectively distributed in real-time, the system adopts the simplified algorithm of operating unit efficacy threshold load splitting optimization control, with constant power and high efficiency. In order to make the power distribution more scientific and effective in real-time, the system adopts the simplified algorithm of operating unit efficacy threshold load splitting control to increase the load threshold of cutting and other operating units under constant power conditions, so that the operating efficiency of the whole machine can be improved. In the simulation test, the efficacy chopping load threshold ratio is about 1.08:1.01:1 for the three operation control methods of optimized control, fuzzy predictive control and PID control of the forage harvester, with 40% of the original feeding amount perturbation applied respectively. production efficiency was significantly improved.

46-54

Authors: Eni SUMARNI, Irmanida BATUBARA, Herry SUHARDIYANTO, Slamet WIDODO, Mohamad SOLAHUDIN, Eti ROHAETI, Folkes LAUMAL

Purwoceng (Pimpinella pruatjan Molkenb) is a medicinal plant native to Indonesia known as Indonesian Viagra from Java. The decline and scarcity of Purwoceng is an important obstacle in meeting the demands of harvesting from the original habitat without conservation and the extreme climatic conditions in the Dieng plateau. Therefore, it is necessary to apply controlled cultivation technology, namely hydroponic technology with drip irrigation in the greenhouse, to increase the yield and quality of Purwoceng. This study aimed to obtain the effect of hydroponic methods and hydroponic nutrition (EC) on the yield and quality of Purwoceng. The study was conducted from December 2020 to March 2021 at a greenhouse of ± 1500 m above sea level. The experiment used a randomized block design with three replications. Each replication consisted of 15 plants. Hydroponic type, which was recirculating drip, non-circulating drip, and nutrient concentration which were 1000 ppm, 1500 ppm, and 2000 ppm. The harvest weight (aerial part and root), moisture, ash, crude fat, crude fiber, water extractive, and ethanol extractive content, and the contaminant (microbial and heavy metal) content, were analyzed. In conclusion, to produce high-quality Purwoceng, a hydroponic system could be used using recirculating drip and 1000 ppm nutrient dose.

65-73

Authors: Guoliang WANG, Huiling DU, Wenjun WANG, Jiangui ZHAO, Hong LI, Erhu GUO, Zhiwei LI

Soil nutrient content is an important index to evaluate the growing environment of crops. Rapid access to soil nutrient information is an important requirement for the development of modern precision agriculture, while the detection of soil organic matter content is a necessary condition for understanding the basic soil fertility and implementing crop precision cultivation. In this paper, the soil of rural fields in the southeast of Shanxi Province before sowing was taken as the research object. 111 soil samples to be tested were collected. After the process of drying, impurity removal and grinding, the hyperspectral data of the Region of interest (ROI) of the samples were collected, and then the chemical determination of soil organic matter content was conducted. The original spectral data matrix was pretreated by numerical transformation operations, such as arithmetic mean, average deviation, 1st derivation, natural logarithm and mixed multiplication, and a Partial least square regression (PLSR) quantitative analysis model was established. In these models, the obtained prediction set RP value under the pretreatment of F(A)*ln(AD) was the highest, reaching 0.8859. For spectral data preprocessed by F(A)* Ln (AD), the Competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) algorithm and Random frog (RF) algorithm were used to select key variables. The PLSR model was established by using F(A)* Ln (AD)&CARS data processing method, and the RP value was increased to 0.9545. The prediction results can accurately reflect the real content of soil organic matter. The results of this study can provide theoretical support for the application of hyperspectral imaging technology in the determination of soil organic matter content, and provide a reference for the rapid detection of other soil components.

88-98

Authors: Yanwen LI, Juxia LI, Zhenyu LIU, Zhifang BI, Hui ZHANG, Lei DUAN

In order to solve the problem that the complex pig house environment leads to the difficulty and low accuracy of abnormal detection of group pigs. The video of 9 adult fattening pigs were collected, and the video key frames were obtained by the frame differential method as the training set, and the YOLOX model for abnormal detection of group pigs was constructed. The results show that the average accuracy of YOLOX model on the test set is 98.0%. The research results can provide a reference for the detection of pig anomalies in the breeding environment of pig farms.

109-120

Authors: Jin CHEN, Hua ZHOU, Hailong CHE, Yuanyi LIU, Pei LI

In the seedling extraction mechanism of the ejection type, because the ejector rod is in direct contact with the seedling substrate, the fragmentation rate of the seedling is high, the success rate is low, and the seedling effect is poor. In order to solve this problem, combined with the interaction between the ejector rod and the bowl seedling, this paper analyzes the working principle of the ejector rod conveyor belt seedling harvesting mechanism, and optimizes the design of the ejector rod conveyor belt seedling harvesting mechanism. By using the method of EDEM simulation analysis and orthogonal experiment, taking the breaking rate and success rate of bowl seedling as the test response index, the effects of ejector rod end form, ejector rod diameter and seedling extraction speed were studied, and the results were analyzed by range analysis and variance analysis to analyze the influence law of the interaction of various factors on bowl seedling extraction. The simulation results show that the crushing rate of bowl seedlings increases with the increase of seedling speed and the decrease of ejector diameter. Among the three different types of ejectors, the effect of round head ejector is the best. The best parameter combination of the seedling mechanism is the diameter of the ejector rod 10mm, the seedling speed 2m/s, and the ejector rod in the form of round head ejector rod. The verification experiment shows that the seedling extraction effect of the optimized seedling extraction mechanism is better than that of the original seedling extraction mechanism. The results show that when the best combination of working parameters is used to collect seedlings, the qualified rate of seedlings is not less than 90%, the fragmentation rate is not higher than 20%, and the seedling performance is relatively stable. The optimized seedling extraction mechanism can be used in the automatic dryland bowl seedling transplanter to meet the operational requirements of the automatic transplanter.

131-144

Authors: Yujie DENG, Guohai ZHANG, Aoqi ZHANG, Jitan LIAN, Jia YAO, Xin WANG, Xiaohui YANG

To address the problems of high breakage rates, high entrainment losses and many unthreshed kernels when harvesting high moisture content maize seeds, a high moisture content maize seed threshing test was designed based on a multifunctional seed harvester stand designed by this group.In order to determine the optimum operating parameters of the threshing unit, single-factor experiments and orthogonal tests were carried out using the threshing drum speed, concave plate clearance and feed rate as test factors and the crushing rate, unthreshing rate, entrained loss rate and trash content rate as test evaluation indicators.The optimum combination of test factors obtained for the harvesting of maize at 32% to 34% moisture content was a drum speed of 346.55r/min, a concave plate clearance of 44.39mm and a feed rate of 9.739Kg/s.After repeated experiments on the bench, the test results with optimum parameters were 6.311% crushing rate, 0.187% unthreshing rate, 0.912% entrained loss rate and 4.251% impurity rate, at which point the crushing rate was the lowest and the other three met national standards.

159-169

Authors: YunHe ZHANG, JinPeng CHENG, XueJun ZHANG, ZengLu SHI, MeiJing WANG, HaiFeng WU, Hao FU

In order to further improve the seeding performance of the maize seed-metering device, a pressure-holding precision seed-metering device for maize was designed. The seed-metering device is made up of several seed rowing modules, which effectively solves the problems of inconvenient disassembly and complex maintenance of the current maize seed-metering device. The working principle of the device was introduced, and the mechanical and kinematic analysis of the maize seeds during the seeding operation was carried out. The orthogonal test was carried out with the installation diameter of seed-metering device's guide plate, torsion spring's wire diameter and seed-metering device's rotational speed as the test factors, the single-seeding rate, missed-seeding rate and multiple-seeding rate as the indexes, and the relationship between different test factors on the performance of seed-metering device was obtained. By optimizing the model, the best performance of the seed-metering device was obtained when the installation diameter of the guide plate was 92.32 mm, the wire diameter of the torsion spring was 1.59 mm, and the rotational speed of the seed-metering device was 0.41 r/s. At this time, the single-seed rate was 93.08%, the missed-seeding rate was 3%, and the multiple-seeding rate was 3.9%, which met the requirements of the industry standard.

177-184

Authors: Delin WU, Enlong ZHAO, Dong FANG, Yilin LIU, Shunli WANG, Cheng WU, Feng GUO

In order to use the resonance principle for vibratory picking of Camellia oleifera fruit, the frequency sweep tests were carried out on the fruiting branches of Camellia oleifera trees. The results showed that the acceleration response of fruit-bearing branches had good consistency. The use of fruit removal rate alone to evaluate the picking effect is not reliable, and the introduction of energy utilization to evaluate the vibration picking effect is significant. The best results were a vibration frequency of 8 Hz and an excitation time of 10 s. The fruit removal rate was 88.12% and the energy utilization rate was 36.72%. Compared with the traditional fruit shedding rate, the application of energy utilization rate to evaluate the picking effect can improve the reliability of the results and reduce the energy loss.

195-204

Authors: Olena NALOBINA, Nazar VASYLCHUK, Oleh BUNDZA, Mykola HOLOTIUK, Vitaliy PUTS, Viktor MARTYNIUK

The relevance of the study is due to the need to reduce the energy intensity of the process of cutting sunflower stalks by choosing a rational profile of knives. The research is based on a comparative analysis of experimental values of cutting forces for the proposed and manufactured design of the knife system and known knife systems. The studies have shown that the implementation of the retaining and main knives of the header in the form of a curved spiral of Archimedes allowed to reduce the cutting force. It was also found that the cutting force for the proposed design of the knife system, unlike other studied, practically does not change with the removal of the stem from the axis of rotation of the knives, which does not require an increase in energy costs for the cutting process.

215-224

Authors: Weiwei CHENG, Xin YOU, Tao TIAN, Jiaxuan LU, Junlin HE, Zhouhua LIU, Fei HAN

A sunken solar greenhouse is the original type of greenhouse in China, its soil wall thermal storage performance is better and low cost. Higher benefits of stereoscopic planting in sunken solar greenhouses, while repeated use of the substrate can produce pathogens, so high-temperature smothering is used for sterilization in the summer months of June to August. To investigate the mechanism of indoor temperature and humidity variation and fungicidal effect in a sunken solar greenhouse, a single cross-sectional test of temperature and humidity in sunken solar greenhouse during the smothering period was conducted using wireless sensors. The results showed that: The maximum value of indoor temperature at noon was 69.5°C the temperature value of all measurement points was greater than 50°C for 3h, when removing the measurement points at the upper surface of the ground, the relative humidity value of other measurement points was less than 60% for 5h. During the daytime period, when the indoor temperature is greater than 28°C in the interval 7:00-12:00, the initial relative humidity value of each measurement point is located at 70%-85%; when the weighted temperature of each measurement point starts to rise at a rate of 1.1°C/10min, the weighted humidity of each measurement point declining is 1.3%/10min; the determination of the rate of change of indoor temperature and humidity during the daytime and the starting value can provide a basis for indoor plants to take measures to sterilize at high temperature.

237-244

Authors: Dejiang LIU, Jianling HU, Yan GONG, Xiao CHEN, Guo WANG, Xiao ZHANG, Yingchun ZHU

Considering the planting mode and agronomics requirements of the existing facilities, the high-power rototilling ridge hoisting and lamination machine is difficult to operate in the greenhouse of the facility, and the small hanging rotary ridge raiser has technical problems such as insufficient horsepower. This paper designs the hanging rotary tillage ridging and film - covering machine. The machine realizes a single operation process to complete rotary tillage, ridging, drip irrigation, film laying and film edge covering soil suppression and other mechanized compound operations. The innovatively designed adjustable ridging device of this machine can steplessly adjust the size of the ridge. The ridge height after operation of the machine is 25-35 cm, the ridge width is 70-80 cm, the ridge shape is arc-shaped, the size is adjustable, and the operation efficiency is improved being 0.17-0.23 hectares/hour, the machine driving speed is set at low speed 1 gear. The machine has high operating efficiency, the arc-shaped ridge body is uniform and compact. the ridge body has a large lighting surface, the film is tightly laid, and it is close to the ridge surface without wrinkling. By test data analysis, the tillage depth stability is 93%, the ridge height qualified rate is 100%, the ridge width qualified rate is 85%, the ridge spacing qualified rate is 95%, the film edge covered soil thickness is 40 mm, the working efficiency is 0.802 hm2/h, the fuel consumption per hectare is 9.02 kg·h/m2, and the three shifts work without fault. To sum up, it meets the agronomic requirements of ridging and film planting.

260-268

Authors: Wenting JIN, Yuqi ZHUANSUN, Tengfei ZHUANG, Qi LU, Wenlong LI, Liuxuan MA

Mechanical weeding in paddy fields is a green and environmentally friendly way to control weeds, which has the advantages of reducing the amount of pesticides and improving the physical structure of the soil. This paper briefly describes the composition and relevant parameters of the mechanical weeding environment in rice fields. Using Creo 5.0, HyperMesh 2017, and LS-PrePost and LS-DYNA software to jointly simulate the interaction process between inverted V-shaped inter-plant weeding component and the soil in the paddy field, the single-point ALE multi-material unit algorithm is used to couple the soil and water with multiple substances, and realize the material movement between the soil and the water layer. Using the penalty function method, a fluid-solid coupling finite element modelled on the interaction between inter-plant weeding components and soil-water was established. The dynamic behavior of the interactions shows that the coupling stress increases and then decreases periodically, and the teeth of the spring cross the soil with a "bending moon (fish scale)" scratch, which can effectively avoid rice seedlings and reduce the injury rate.

285-294

Authors: Zhenfeng XU, Jiajian YANG, Huan ZHOU, Yunfang HOU

This paper describes the design and implementation of a wireless sensor based on NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) for monitoring agricultural environmental information. The sensor is capable of real-time monitoring of four environmental parameters, including ambient temperature, relative humidity, illuminance, and CO2 concentration. In the hardware design, sensor elements are selected based on the measurement ranges and accuracies specified in agricultural environmental monitoring industry standards. The hardware circuit is designed using the BC35-G type NB-IoT module and STM32 MCU (Microcontroller Unit). In the software design, data from the environmental parameters are collected and processed by the STM32 MCU and sent to the OneNET cloud platform through the NB-IoT module. The OneNET cloud platform enables users to view the relevant environmental data collected by the sensors using mobile phones and other mobile terminals. To test the effectiveness of the developed sensors, they were tested in a glass greenhouse at Fuyang Ziqing Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. in Anhui Province. The results demonstrate that the sensors can accurately collect the data of relevant environmental parameters and can provide stable wireless transmission of data remotely, making them suitable for practical engineering applications. In summary, this wireless remote monitoring sensor based on NB-IoT represents a significant advancement in the field of agricultural automation. The sensor's ability to accurately monitor and wirelessly transmit data in real-time provides farmers with valuable information to optimize crop growth and maximize yields.

305-314

Authors: Igor TSIZ, Serhiі KHOMYCH, Vasyl SATSIUK, Victor TARASIUK

For many years, global researches that focus on improving soil fertility have been conducted. Nowadays, innovative inculcations of environmentally (ecologically) friendly organic agriculture are becoming quite popular. One of the most effective indicators is the use of alternative types of fertilizers. As part of large-scale experiments, researchers propose to use fertilizers made from organic sapropel concentrated in freshwater lakes. Analysis of such studies shows that the impact of sapropel on soil fertility is significant and complex. The main problem they faced is the extraction of these deposits from underwater deposits (fields). Ukrainian scientists have proven the effectiveness of sapropel extraction by means of a pneumatic intake device. To substantiate the rational parameters of this device and visualize the processes, experimental studies of the work of the pneumatic working body were carried out. Namely, experimental studies of the determination of the trajectories of air bubbles in liquids of different viscosity were carried out. According to received trajectories, the boundaries of airflow and its shape are determined. Limpid liquids of different viscosities were used specially in order to see and fix the flow parameters, because it is impossible to observe such a phenomenon in sapropels placed in underwater deposits, due to their opacity and change of viscosity with depth of the bedding. Therefore, the experiment was considered as close as possible to the real one, and the environment of realization of the experiment was simulated. Water, industrial oil and concentrated detergent were selected as investigated liquids. Research data indicate that one can use a whirling airflow for better loosening of deposits of reduced humidity. Whirling occurs when there is a horizontal position of the outlet axis with a diameter in the range of 1-1.5 mm and air pressure of 300-400 kPa.

325-334

Authors: Zhi HE, Zixu LI, Xingting DING, Kai LI, Yinggang SHI, Yongjie CUI

A kiwifruit harvesting end effector was designed and developed to improve the efficiency of mechanized kiwifruit harvesting. Firstly, the automated kiwifruit picking process was determined according to the kiwifruit orchard working environment. Secondly, the end-effector was designed and analyzed based on the principle of kiwifruit picking. Finally, an orchard experiment was conducted with the clamping force, rotation angle and rotation speed of the end-effector as test factors, and the separation success rate, separation time and damage rate of kiwifruit fruit as test indicators. A regression model between the test factors and test indicators was established using a quadratic fitting equation to analyze the influence between the test factors and indicators. The experimental results showed that the optimal parameter was a clamping force of 3.05 N, a separation angle of 65.75°, and a separation speed of 60.03°/s. The results of the study provide theoretical basis and technical support for automated kiwifruit harvesting.

349-358

Authors: Aman SANTOSO, Lilik Eka RADIATI, Evi DAMAYANTI, Armaini ARMAINI, Amiroh NABILAH-MUJAHIDAH, Eli Hendrik SANJAYA, Muntholib MUNTHOLIB, Muhammad Roy ASRORI

Goat milk kefir has high nutritional value, especially in protein and calcium content and has a low lactose content. Vacuum drying is an alternative to remove the water content in kefir so that it can extend the shelf life because it inhibits bacterial growth. This study determines the effect of aging time and drying time using vacuum drying method on the characteristics and amino acid composition of goat milk kefir (kefir and powder kefir). Fermented goat milk (24 hours) use kefir grains without aging and with aging times of 1, 2, 3, 4 (week). The total titrated acid and fat content were significantly different in kefir, but it is not significantly different in powder kefir. The yield, moisture, ash, protein, fiber, and fat in both kefir and powder kefir did not show significant differences. The best treatment based on the exponential comparison method for both powder kefir and kefir was 3 weeks of aging time. Therefore, the amino acid components in powder kefir and kefir underwent changes. The highest total amino acids in kefir was kefir without aging. The highest amino acid of powder kefir was obtained after 2 weeks of aging time.

369-378

Authors: Gennadii GOLUB, Viacheslav CHUBA, Vasyl ACHKEVYCH, Victor KRUSHELNYTSKYI, Nataliya TSYVENKOVA

The article defines the influence of the traction resistance of the machine-tractor unit working tool on the weight distribution of the tractor along the running system axles. Depending on the type of field work, the resistance force of tools aggregated with a tractor has a different value, accordingly, the tractor has a different weight distribution along the axles and, thus, different ground pressure. An increase in pressure on the soil leads to additional costs for tillage, and in the future to a decrease in agricultural production efficiency. The article presents a mathematical model for determining the reactions of the soil, and, accordingly, the pressure of tractor engines on the ground, depending on the structural parameters of the tractor, its adequacy estimation, and an example of calculating the weight distribution along the tractor axles.

389-398

Authors: Oleksandr ZABOLOTNYI, Vitalii ZABOLOTNYI, Nicolay KOSHEVOY

The main task was to receive a robust transfer function for the capacitive grain moisture measurement system. It was estimated how the new transfer function compensates for the type uncertainty and how close it is to the nominal values of moisture content. Dispersions of adequacy and repeatability of the new transfer function, which describe possible variation in the measured moisture values and the correspondence of the new transfer function with the nominal linear transfer function of a moisture meter respectively, were calculated for five chosen substances. It was proved that the new transfer function has lower sensitivity to grain type and better adequacy to the ideal transfer function than the closest analog.

409-416

Authors: Bing XU, Decong ZHENG, Qingliang CUI, Hanqing YAO

In the buckwheat industry, buckwheat sizing effect has played a significant role in the subsequent hulling effect and food quality in its deep processing. In order to study the influence of inclination angle of linear vibrating screen on buckwheat sizing effect, EDEM was used for numerical simulation of sizing process with the inclination angle of the screen separately at 2°, 3°, 4°, and 5°. By observing particle distribution on the screen deck and calculating the different types of particles in various statistical areas, qualitative comparison and quantitative analysis on the conveying capability of the screen and the penetrating capability of particles at different inclination angles were made, and the results revealed that with the increase in the inclination angle of the screen, the conveying capability of the screen was enhanced, while particles became less capable of penetrating through the sieve. When the inclination angle was increased from 2° to 3°, the conveying capability of the screen was significantly improved, while the penetrating capability of particles on both screen decks was slightly reduced. By taking the penetrating capability of particles and the conveying capability of the screen into comprehensive consideration, it turned out that better sizing effect would be achieved at the inclination angle of 3o. Our research will provide a reference for optimizing the processing parameters during the vibrating separation of buckwheat.

427-436

Authors: Alexandru-Polifron CHIRIȚĂ, Cristian PAVEL

Both in the case of precision agriculture and in the case of some agricultural works, in which the technological process is dependent on the velocity of displacement of the platform carrying the agricultural equipment, it is necessary to precisely adjust or even continuously adjust the velocity of displacement. This article presents the capabilities of continuously regulating the travel velocity of an agricultural platform equipped with a hydrostatic transmission and a PID controller with feedback, feedforward, as well as nonlinear disturbance compensation capabilities; such a platform can be fitted with various agricultural equipment.

449-460

Authors: Yakun ZHANG, Zihua FENG, Yalin HUANG, Tingting LI, Xingyang YANG, Hangxing ZHANG, Libo WANG

Smart agriculture, which combines the Internet of Things (IoT) with agriculture, is the future of agricultural development. In China, manual irrigation is currently the dominant method for seedling irrigation management, but it is inefficient and can lead to water waste. To improve seedling quality and output, reduce labor costs, and conserve water resources, this paper presents a design for an IoT system that uses soil moisture detection and remote precision irrigation for seedlings. The system includes a STC12C5A60S2 microcontroller, an ESP8266-01S communication module, a PRISON PR-3000-ECTH-N01 soil temperature and humidity module, and a 12V water pump. The system is connected to the OneNET platform via the MQTT protocol of the Wi-Fi module and includes software modules for data processing, Wi-Fi communication, and relay control. The OneNET platform allows users to monitor and record real-time temperature and humidity data and switch between automatic and manual modes and seedling threshold types. The system was tested for 24 hours and collected 28,000 temperature and humidity data points every 3 seconds with a packet loss rate of less than 5%. The results show that the system is stable and reliable.

471-480

Authors: Jizhong WANG, Xianfa FANG, Fengzhu WANG, Yangchun LIU, Bo ZHAO

In order to reduce the harvest loss and optimize and improve the comprehensive performance of the combine harvester, the relationship between the feeding quantity, drum torque, drum speed, harvest loss, and other factors of the wheat combine harvester is studied, and the functional relationship between the loss, feeding quantity and speed is determined. According to the test data, the relationship model between the feeding quantity of the harvester and the drum torque is a quadratic function. For the land with uniform growth, the size of feeding quantity is mainly affected by the forward speed of the harvester. In this way, this paper indirectly achieves the purpose of controlling the feeding quantity by controlling the speed of the harvesting machinery. The control system designed in this paper uses the compensated fuzzy PID to control the walking speed of the vehicle through real-time detection of the drum torque, drum speed and loss of the harvester, so as to comprehensively control the working speed of the harvester and effectively control the harvest loss. The test results show that the control system can effectively reduce the harvest loss and improve the harvest efficiency compared with the manual harvest of the wheat.

492-500

Authors: Ronghua WANG, Yanbin ZHANG, Jianmin DU, Yuge BI

Identification and classification of vegetation are the basis for grassland degradation monitoring, classification and quantification studies. Here, four deep learning models were used to classify the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) hyperspectral remote sensing images of desert grassland. VGG16 and ResNet18 achieved better image classification results for vegetation and bare soil, whereas three-dimensional (3D)-VGG16 and 3D-ResNet18, improved by 3D convolutional kernels, achieved better classification for vegetation, bare soil and small sample features in the images. The number of convolutional kernels, its size and batch size parameters of each model were optimised, and 3D-ResNet18-J had the best classification performance, with an overall classification accuracy of 97.74%. It achieved high precision and efficiency in classifying UAV hyperspectral remote sensing images of desert grassland.

511-519

Authors: Zedong ZHAO, Hongyong DU, Xiaohui YANG, Guohai ZHANG

To better analyze the distribution law of airflow in the wind sieve type cleaning device, this study took the cleaning device of Yafeng 4YZL-6S corn seed harvester as an example and conducted numerical simulation and comparative analysis of the airflow field inside the cleaning device under the sieve plate opening scales of 12, 16 and 20 mm using CFD software. The numerical simulation showed that the distribution of airflow velocity above the sieve surface was uniform at a sieve plate opening scale of 16 mm. Airflow velocity measurements were performed on the test prototype using an anemometer to verify the accuracy of the numerical simulation results. The simulation test results were supplemented by field trials, which showed that when the speed of the cleaning fan was 1200 r/min and the sieve plate opening scale was 16 mm, the impurity rate in the field harvest of the operating machinery was 1.03% and the loss rate was 1.91%. The operating effect met the standard of mechanized corn grain harvesting. This paper can provide a reference for the design and working mechanism research of corn seed harvester cleaning devices.

527-536

Authors: Shilei KANG, Jiaxuan LU, Huhu YANG, Yanxi GUO, Junlin HE

The mechanical parameters of Cerasus humilis are the basic data for subsequent studies on fruit deformation, damage, and movement characteristics during harvesting and transportation, but these parameters are rarely reported. Relevant mechanical parameters of whole fruit compression are calculated by comparing physical tests and virtual simulations. The orthogonal rotating combined experimental design was used to arrange the simulation tests, with the elastic modulus (E), yield limit (Ey), and tangent modulus (Et) as the influence factors and compression force as the result. Response surface optimization was employed to find the closest test point to the force–deformation curve of the physical test. The parameters of the pulp test point are as follows: E = 0.923 MPa, Ey = 0.0897 MPa, and Et = 0.478 MPa. Results show that the step on the force–deformation curve was not the beginning of the pulp yield, which was substantially earlier than the strain rate at the simulation step. The region of increased stress in the pulp first appeared at the junction with the core due to stress concentration. Combining virtual and physical tests to solve the mechanical parameters of fruits is more suitable than testing the standard pulp sample.

549-558

Authors: Ning HAN, Tonghui WU, Qian WU, Hongzhi DU, Zhiyong ZHANG, Yanqing ZHANG

Flaxseed oil is rich in α-linolenic acid and other nutrients, and the adulteration happens frequently because of its high price. To detect the adulteration of flaxseed oil quickly and accurately, a method was proposed based on weighted reconstructed two-dimensional correlation near-infrared(NIR) spectra. The near-infrared spectra of 79 adulterated flaxseed oil samples (adulterated by rapeseed oil with the doping volume ratio 1%-40%) were measured, and the traditional two-dimensional correlation synchronous spectra were calculated. The two-dimensional correlation synchronous spectra of all samples were decomposed into multiple components of different scales by the bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition algorithm (BEMD). According to the root mean square error(RMSE) values of the adulteration detection sub-models established by each component, the weights of the corresponding components were calculated, and then the two-dimensional correlation spectra of all samples were reconstructed by accumulating the weighted components. A quantitative analysis model of flaxseed oil adulteration was established based on the weighted reconstructed two-dimensional correlation spectra combined with the N-way partial least square(N-PLS)algorithm. Compared with the traditional two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy, the model built by the weighted reconstructed two-dimensional correlation spectra had better performance with the calibration determination coefficient increased by 6.05%, and the prediction determination coefficient increased by 7.5%. The proposed method could effectively enhance the spectral feature information, reduce the spectral noise interference, and hence provide a new idea for the detection of edible oil adulteration.

569-578

Authors: Yan CHEN, Hua GUO, Shi FU, Rui ZHANG, Ming ZHANG

The objective of ecological restoration and rehabilitation of grasslands is to recreate the original appearance of damaged or degraded vegetation. From previous research, the pneumatic spraying technology is now more commonly used in the world for vegetation restoration. Pneumatic spraying is relatively inexpensive and causes little damage to the original vegetation, making it one of the most effective techniques for restoring natural grassland vegetation under natural climatic conditions. In this paper, the effect of the spraying machine pipe working airflow on the quality of spraying was studied through simulation analysis and experimental tests. The seeding area of the spraying machine corresponding to different values of the pipe inlet airflow speed was determined. The conclusions show that: 1) the spray pipe inlet airflow velocity has a great influence on the uniformity of spraying. When the airflow velocity is higher than 55 m/s, the spraying is not uniform, while the airflow velocity is lower than 45 m/s, the spraying amplitude is smaller, the operational efficiency is low, which is not conducive to the restoration of degraded grasslands; 2) considering the uniformity of spraying and operational efficiency, the airflow velocity at the inlet of the spray pipe should be between 45 and 55 m/s when the spraying machine is in operation. The seed drop area is changed, by adjusting the airflow velocity of the spray pipe inlet, and the reseeding and leakage area of the seed drop area is reduced, so that the spraying performance of the spraying machine is optimized.

589-596

Authors: Bolong WANG, Zhiyong LIN, Mingjie GAO, Guohai ZHANG, Duanyang GENG, Zhou SHI

It is urgent to study the damage mechanism of corn kernels and find ways of reducing the rate of kernel breakage in mechanical threshing. This paper, by studying the mechanical curves and deformation characteristics of corn kernels with different moisture contents, points out the brittle mechanical characteristics of corn kernel damage fracture with low moisture content, and clarifies the the variation law of mechanical properties of kernels with moisture contents. The experimental data of fatigue load - fatigue life curves of corn kernels with different moisture contents were described by the power function equation. At the same time, the fatigue life and damage characteristics of kernel with different moisture content were analyzed, and the accuracy of the fitting equation was verified. Through mathematical statistical analysis, the normal distribution curve of fatigue life was fitted, and the variation law of normal distribution curve with moisture content and fatigue load was determined.

609-616

Authors: Emil TUDOR, Mihai-Gabriel MATACHE, Ionuț VASILE, Ion-Cătălin SBURLAN, Vasilica ȘTEFAN

The development of an electric vehicle harvester for aquatic vegetation is a technical challenge for researchers due to specific requirements: high-torque operation at low travel speeds, high maneuverability, high load capacity, low draught, and affordable price. The collective of authors proposed an electro-hydraulic architecture based on paddles driven by hydraulic motors for propulsion and auxiliary services also driven by motors and hydraulic actuators. The proposed energy source for the aquatic harvester is electric batteries, it was developed a system of 33 kWh Li-Ion batteries connected in parallel, which power an electronic converter and a 14.5 kW rated power electric motor that drives a hydraulic double-circuit pump. The vehicle can be controlled remotely. The paper presents the prototype made and the results obtained during laboratory tests performed for the electric powering system.

626-634

Authors: ZhiPeng FAN, Zhe MA, HongBo WANG, ZhiHong YU

In order to explore the conveying mechanism of kneaded corn stalk in the screw conveyor and improve the conveying performance of the screw conveyor, the study of the screw conveying process of kneaded corn stalk was carried out, and the simulation model of the screw conveying process of kneaded corn stalk was established by using the discrete element method. The results showed that: The pitch, feed amount and screw shaft speed have significant effects on the productivity and power of screw conveying, and there are significant interactions. The optimal parameters of the multi-factor simulation optimization test were 319.428mm pitch, feed amount of 71.062kg/min, screwshaft speed of 117.034r/min, corresponding productivity of 71.517kg/min and power of 769.84W. This study reveals the screw conveying mechanism of kneaded corn stover, verifies the feasibility of using discrete element simulation to analyze the conveying process of kneaded corn stover, and provides a theoretical basis for improving and optimizing the screw conveying device.

645-654

Authors: Yan CHEN, Hua GUO, Shi FU, Rui ZHANG, Ming ZHANG

The working parameters of the pneumatic sprayer, such as the sprayer's attitude, working airflow, and spraying amount, have an impact on the evenness of seed distribution during the process of vegetation restoration on degraded grasslands . This article focuses on the 4BQD-40C pneumatic sprayer and analyzes the impact of the sprayer's forward speed, the airflow velocity at the sprayer's inlet, and the frequency of the sprayer's swinging nozzle on the spraying quality. The conclusion shows that: 1) the equation of the seed distribution trajectory of the sprayer was obtained, laying the foundation for subsequent research; 2) the swinging frequency of the nozzle is the key factor affecting the spraying quality of the sprayer, and the optimal swinging frequency of the nozzle corresponding to different forward speeds of the sprayer was obtained based on the established trajectory equation; 3) when the sprayer performs spraying operations with the optimized forward speed and swinging frequency, the trajectory of the sprayer's seed distribution was analyzed. It was found that when the nozzle swings at each optimal frequency, the trajectory of the seed distribution is the same, and the sum of the re-sprayed and missed areas in the seed distribution area is equal.

665-672

Authors: Volodymyr KRAVCHUK, Mikhailo IVANIUTA, Viacheslav BRATISHKO, Yuri HUMENIUK, Vitaly KURKA

The article is focused on the determination of the nonlinear relationships between soil compaction, density, and water content. It was found that these properties can be described by the second-order models and used for improving devices for the on-stream soil density measuring. The models for determining the density of loamy soil (at a water content of 20%) in the range from 0.9 to 1.6 g/cm3 with an extremum of 1.35 g/cm3 were improved. A device for the on-stream soil density measuring is proposed. The device operates within the soil compaction range from 0.3 to 1.2 MPa and water content from 10 to 30% at the angle of inclination of the kinematic link  from 15 to 40 degrees. The obtained results can be used in the adaptation of the proposed device for use in precision agriculture.

681-692

Authors: Xin HE, Longfei LI, Xing LIU, Yumeng XIAO, Taowei JIAO, Wei LI

This paper proposed a technical idea of joint operation of conveying and grading and developed a potato conveying and grading device with variable space to realize efficient grading in the field because of the difficulties of field grading in the process of potato harvesting in the hilly mountains of northwest China. Based on field measurement of potato size distribution, the clearance between rotating plates of potato conveying and grading device was determined. The key structural parameters of the rotating plate were obtained by referring to the structure and relevant parameters of the conveying and grading device. Moreover, the conveyor chain elevation angle of the conveying and grading device was determined through the dynamics analysis of potatoes on the conveying and grading device. The inclined plane test determined the inclination angle of the potato guide plate. To reduce the damage to potatoes in the process of conveying and grading, damage analysis was carried out. Finally, Field tests were conducted with conveyor chain elevation angle, unit forward speed, and the conveyor chain line speed as test factors, and the grading accuracy and the damage rate of the potato conveying and grading device as test indexes. The test results showed that when the conveyor chain elevation angle, unit forward speed, and conveyor chain line speed were 21.0°, 0.8 m/s, and 1.3 m/s, respectively, the grading accuracy was 91.4% and the rate of potato damage was 0.88%. The operational performance of the prototype was stable, and all the test evaluation indicators could meet the agronomic requirements of the potato harvester.

21-31

Authors: JunLin MU, JinXing WANG, ShuangXi LIU, Zhen WANG, Hao JIANG, Bo MA, ZhengHui ZHANG, XianLiang HU

The core of intelligent and accurate plant protection of pests is the accurate identification of pest monitoring and early warning model, and the quality of pest sample image is crucial to the model identification accuracy. To solve the problem of complicated background and low contrast colour image samples, in this paper it is proposed a pest accurate segmentation method based on critical point nonlinear enhancement. The segmented image is used as the sample image of the Faster R-CNN model, which can improve the accuracy of the recognition model. Firstly, the original image is segmented by a strong classifier and the image of pest cells with calibrated grids is obtained. Secondly, the Spline adjustment curve is fitted according to the core gray scale range and critical point, and the contrast between pest and mesh in pest monomer image is enhanced based on the Spline adjustment curve. Finally, there are some operations for the enhanced image such as threshold segmentation, contour extraction, morphological transformation and others to obtain the pest image without background interference, and some segmentation experiments are performed to the pest image based on different segmentation methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately segment the pests in complex background, and the comprehensive evaluation indexes such as recall ratio and precision rate are greater than or equal to 91.5%, which is better than the traditional segmentation method.

41-50

Authors: Yao YUE, Haiqing TIAN, Fei LIU, Tao ZHANG, Dapeng LI, Di WANG

Aiming at the problems of large vibrations and noise of a working stalk rubbing machine, this paper took the 9R-60 rubbing machine as the research object and used the B&K modal test system and the vibration test system to analyse the modal and no-load conditions of the whole machine. Through analysing modal test data, it was concluded that the first five natural frequencies of the machine were 95.262 Hz, 144.386 Hz, 288.198 Hz, 313.719 Hz and 326.140 Hz. The results showed that spindle rotation had a more significant effect on the vibration than the feed chain rotation; the maximum vibration acceleration occurred at the small motor frame at a spindle speed of 1700 r·min-1 and a feed chain speed of 0.65 m·s-1, which was 135.539 m·s-2. The distribution of the amplitude statistical characteristics of the vibration signals follows the normal distribution and belongs to the stationary random process. The vibration was a self-excited vibration of the rotating machinery caused by the rotation of the main shaft and a forced vibration excited by the rotation of the same shaft. The research provides a direction for further research on the vibration characteristics of the rubbing machine under load conditions, and provides a theoretical basis for the subsequent vibration reduction design.

60-70

Authors: Lin WAN, Hongchao WANG, Gang CHE, Wensheng SUN, Zhengfa CHEN

In order to improve air pressure utilization and working performance, the direct seed-metering device for rice was designed with spoiler blades embedded in the air cavity. The study was carried out using theoretical analysis and hydrodynamic methods to obtain the optimum structure of the spoiler blades. Taking the rotating speed of the air cavity, the negative pressure of the air cavity, and the filling height as the test factors, the multiple regression analysis and the response surface analysis were carried out to obtain the best working parameters of the seed-metering device with spoiler blades. The results showed that when the rotating speed of the air cavity was 23.56 r/min, the negative pressure of the air cavity was 4.97 kPa and the filling height was 12.82 cm, the qualified index was 95.21%, the missing index was 3.28% and the multiple index was 1.51%, which was the best seeding performance. Comparing the test with the seed-metering device without spoiler blades, the results showed that the installation of spoiler blades can improve the performance of the seed-metering device under the best working parameters. This study provide a reference for the design of direct seed-metering device for rice.

81-90

Authors: Xinyu ZHANG, Dandan CAO, Minghui WANG, Gongpei CUI, Yinggang SHI, Yongjie CUI

The phenotypic information of lettuce leaves can well reflect its health. In order to diagnose the nutrient deficiency types of hydroponic lettuce accurately, non-destructively and quickly in the mid-growth stage, a method for diagnosis of whole lettuce based on random forest algorithm (RF) was proposed. The images of lettuce under four different conditions, K-deficiency, Ca-deficiency, N-deficiency and Normal, were collected and segmented by Extra-green algorithm. Then, features of color, texture and shape were extracted. A RF classification model for the hydroponic lettuce nutrient deficiency diagnosis was constructed and compared with support vector machine (SVM) and back propagation neural network (BP). RF had the best classification effect among the three methods. The overall classification accuracy was 86.32%, Kappa coefficient was 0.82, and it can provide a basis for the prevention and remedies of lettuce deficiency and the scientific management of nutrient solutions.

99-109

Authors: Liang ZHANG, Ming LI, Limin YAO, Jingxin XIE, Xu XIAO, Jingjing HUANG, Jinqi HUANG, Xumeng LI, Kui FANG

Farmland area data is one of the important agricultural basic data, which provides parameter basis for the precise operation of agricultural equipment. In order to meet the technical needs of farmers and agricultural machinery operation service billing for acquiring basic information of farmland, this study proposes a farmland area measuring instrument based on the Beidou Navigation Satellite System. Firstly, the overall design scheme of the measuring instrument, the hardware circuit design scheme and the algorithm design scheme are introduced, and the triangulation area measurement algorithm is emphatically analyzed. Finally, the design of this research is applied. The farmland area measuring instrument measures the area of different shapes of farmland and verifies the measurement accuracy. The results show that the average relative error of the measuring instrument for measuring the area of irregularly shaped farmland is 0.7%, which realizes the rapid and high-precision measurement of the area of arbitrarily shaped farmland. It is hoped that this study can provide some reference for the research on the area measurement of farmland in my country.

119-126

Authors: Weiwei CHENG, Zhonghua LIU

A sunken solar greenhouse has a good heat preservation environment. The influence of the general indoor temperature on the temperature of the roots was evaluated. A wireless sensor and U disk recorder were used to determine the indoor temperatures of a single section and multiple sections in a sunken solar greenhouse. Results showed that the rate of temperature change from in the vertical, horizontal and longitudinal sections in descending order at the opening moment and at the strong light moment. The temperatures in the single cross-section and multiple cross-sections were approximately equal during winter from 00:00 to 8:00 in the morning. These values can be used for calculating theoretically the heat loss in a greenhouse.

138-146

Authors: Bingchuan BIAN, Tao SONG

According to the flow calculation, the basic structure of the sprinkler pipe of the integrated suction and drainage fertilizer truck was designed. Based on the 3D CAD / CAE Software SolidWorks / flow simulation platform, the structural models of three kinds of sprinkler pipes with different layout forms of outlet pipes were established, and the fluid analysis was carried out. According to the distribution of pressure, velocity and flow trace number in the tube, the optimal structure was obtained.

156-166

Authors: Chao HUANG, Shu CHEN, Qing JIANG, Liang-yuan XU

To enable the accurate detection of grain moisture content and improve the efficiency of the drying process, a parallel-plate moisture content detection device (PPMCDD) was developed in this study. Firstly, the detection principle and influencing factors of this device are analyzed. Then the effects of three key factors as distance, thickness, relative area on the accuracy of the device were determined through simulation, and the optimal combination of parameters was obtained through analysis of variance of a regression model and response surface methodology. Finally, a simple test bench is built to verify the effectiveness of PPMCDD by comparative experiment. Through simulation and response surface analysis, the optimal combination parameters are as follows: thickness =1 mm, pacing =19.54 mm, relative area =4023.17 mm2, corresponding to the measured capacitance value of 37.676 pF. By comparative experimental analysis, it is found that the maximal relative error of the moisture content detection device evaluated in this study was 1.58%. The detection error is small, and the device exhibits high accuracy and stability and meets the design requirement.

177-190

Authors: Zhongyi YU, Wei XIONG, Dequan ZHU, Kang XUE, Shun ZHANG, Fuming KUANG, Jinnan QUE, Xiaoshuang ZHANG, Ben HENG

In order to obtain the discrete element contact parameters of wet and viscous paddy field mud particles, an accurate numerical simulation model was constructed. Firstly,, the paddy field mud with an average particle size of 0.2 mm was taken as the research object, and the basic physical parameters and rheological behavior laws were obtained through physical measurements and rotational rheological tests. Based on the slump test, combined with the particle scaling theory and Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model, and the slump and slump-flow values were taken as response values, the Plackett-Burman test, the steepest climb test and the Box-Behnken test were designed by Design-Expert software to complete the simulation parameters calibration. The optimal significance parameters are as follows: 0.096 J/m2 for the JKR surface energy of mud, 0.13 for the mud-mud restitution coefficient and 0.6 for the mud-steel static friction coefficient. Finally, the mud slump and fluidity verification tests showed that the relative errors between the simulation values and the physical values of slump and slump-flow are 1.73% and 0.42%, and the average error of torque is 2.47%, and the parameters are accurate and reliable. The calibration method can accurately construct the discrete element model of wet-viscous particles, which provides basic data and technical guidance for the coupling mechanism of paddy machinery-mud.

201-210

Authors: Dandy Z. SJECHLAD, S.A. WIDYANTO, B. PURWANGGONO, M. MUNADI

Uneven drying is a prominent problem in the performance of Flatbed type grain dryer. An effort to move around the materials during the drying process is needed in order to get a uniformed drying rate. This paper investigates the conditions of an evenly distributed reduction of materials' water content during drying, using a flatbed dryer and a stirring mechanization system. It is found that ≥ 4rpm stirring rotation produces a relatively even drying result after 1 hour, and that there exists a second airflow that leaked due to the stirring process moving around with the motion of the stirrer.

221-229

Authors: Zuoli FU, Zhiqi ZHENG, Guichuan LI, Yuxiang HUANG, Ruixiang ZHU, Jinpu HE

The pneumatic conveying metering technology is used to enhance the filling and clearing capacity of the seed metering device by forming a rotary air flow field inside the airflow distribution. The simulation test results show that the increase of the number of fan blades, the velocity of flow field at different outlets of the seed cleaning area decreases linearly, but the average velocity basically remains unchanged. The flow field velocity in the seed filling area decreased significantly with the increase of fan angle, and the difference between seed filling area and clearing area remains unchanged. When the blade angles in the filling area are the same, the fan blades size has no effect in flow field velocity.

243-254

Authors: Junming HOU, Enchao YAO, Hongjie ZHU, Weixue HU, Zhaotan REN

To study the types of mechanical damage for castor seeds and their effects on germination, the image processing method was applied to detect the damage affecting germination. Two typical varieties of castor were selected for test. The type of mechanical damage of castor seeds was taken as the factor, the germination rate and germination vigor index were selected as indicators for one-way analysis of variance. The effects of mechanical damage on the germination of castor seeds were analyzed. Different algorithms were applied to extract the features of cracks and seed shell missing, and the corresponding defect parameters were calculated. The results showed that the effects of mechanical damage on the germination rate, germination potential, germination index, and vigor index of castor seeds were significant. The endosperm damage seriously affected the activity of castor seeds and seriously hindered seed germination. According to the analysis of the shell, some castor seeds cracked or there was incomplete shell damage at the same time, the internal endosperm being also damaged. The actual crack length was compared with the length measured by the ultra-depth of field microscope, which found that the margin of error was about 25% and the better error was 10%. Through the morphological processing, it could completely extract the characteristics of castor seed image without seed shells. The error between the extracted feature area and the measured object area function of the super depth of field microscope is about 10%.

265-274

Authors: Zhiwei TIAN, Xinyu XUE, Famin DUAN, Sen YAO, Wei MA

When UAVs apply a pesticide at different speeds, droplet deposition area and canopy vortex area are not at the same location, which prevents droplets from depositing on the backside of leaves and lower part of plants in canopy vortex, and affects spray quality and pests and diseases control effect. To shorten the distance between the two areas and improve droplet penetration, a method for adjusting nozzle inclination angle based on droplet force analysis and tests was proposed in this paper. According to the obtained model, an automatic nozzle angle adjustment system was developed from hardware and software. The experimental results showed that the number of droplets deposited on the entire leaf increased by 21.58% when UAV spraying with the system mounted. The average number of droplets on the front side of the leaf increased by 14.44% while 66.05% was on the backside of the leaf with the system mounted. This indicates that the method and system proposed have a significant impact on improving the UAV spray penetration.

285-294

Authors: Jingyu LI, Sihao ZHANG, Pengfei ZHANG, Wenjun WANG

In order to solve the problems of crop residue clogging, poor soil crushing and low operation efficiency under the stalks mulching condition, the traction combined machine for subsoiling and land preparation was designed. The optimization test was carried out to optimize the stalk cutting device and the soil crushing device under stalk mulching condition. The optimization test used a randomized complete block design, consisting of 10 treatments, in a 5 × 2 factorial arrangement. Each treatment included the combination of coulter types (8W, 13W, 18W, 25W and NW) and soil crushing roller types (with blade angle and without blade angle). The results showed that the combination of the fluted coulters with 8 waves and the soil crushing roller with blade angle was optimal. Finally, the verification test of the whole machine was carried out to evaluate the performance, and the results showed that the average value of subsoiling depth was 35.8 cm, the stability coefficient of subsoiling depth was 93.9% and the soil crushing rate was 53.7%. This research provides an important reference for the structure design of the large multi-functional combined machine for conservation tillage.

305-314

Authors: Xin DU, Cailing LIU, Meng JIANG, Hao YUAN, Lei DAI, Fanglin LI, Zhanpeng GAO

A layered fertilizer shovel is designed to achieve double layer fertilization in response to the current problem of large fertilizer efficiency loss in one-time banding application. The key structural parameters of the layered shovel were designed and the working speed V, the distance L1 between the banding fertilizer discharging pipe and the point-applied fertilizer discharging device and the distance L2 between the fertilizer distribution plate and the point-applied fertilizer discharging device were determined as the main factors affecting the layered distance h. A quadratic regression model between factors and indicators was established by single-factor test and response surface analysis. With the layered distance h=10 cm as the optimization target, the predicted value of layered distance h is 10 cm when V, L1 and L2 are 2.7 km/h, 15.3 cm and 18.2 cm, respectively, and the simulation test is conducted to verify the combination of the parameters obtained from the optimization solution, and the simulated value of layered distance h is 9.9 cm, which is a small error compared with the predicted value. The field test was conducted under the optimal combination of parameters, and the results showed that the layered distance h was 9.1 cm at the working speed V of 2.7 km/h, and the relative error was 8.1% compared with the simulation value, which can be considered as a high reliability of the simulation test, and the simulation test can accurately simulate the distribution of fertilizer particles in the real environment in the field. When the working speed V is 1.8-5.4 km/h, the distribution range of layered distance h is 8.0-9.5 cm, which can meet the agronomic requirements of fertilizer layered application.

324-332

Authors: Hongguang YANG, Bing WANG, Fengwei GU, Feng WU, Yanhua ZHANG, Zhichao HU

Lack of sufficient knowledge about the physical and mechanical properties of onion can result in higher waste during harvesting and post-harvesting. The objective of this work was to determine some physical and mechanical properties of onion cultivated in China. These properties include linear dimensions, mass, shape index, pull-out force, compression and shear forces. The mean longitudinal diameter of bulb (BLD), transverse diameter of bulb (BTD), bulb weight (BW), pull-out force of bulb (BPF), depth of the bulb buried in the soil (BSD), bulb shape index (BSI), diameter of cauloid (CD), circumferential distribution of root systems (RCD), longitudinal length of root systems (RLL) and weight of root systems (RW) were 78.1±9.6 mm, 89.6±10.1 mm, 333.0±101.7 g, 43.9±21.6 N, 35.7±8.7 mm, 1.2±0.1, 15.3±3.7 mm, 89.2±19.7 mm, 42.9±10.0 mm and 0.8±0.4 g. In the study of mechanical properties of onions, the maximum compression force (MCF) required for compression deformation 10mm of bulb was 462.2N, and the maximum shear failure force (MSF) required for shearing of cauloid was 113.8 N. The results of the research will be very useful in the design and optimization of harvest and postharvest machines with reduced waste and damage.

341-349

Authors: Fulong XU, Junlin HE, Yuehua WANG, Jiaojiao LI

In view of the problem of plant entanglement threshing roller in the process of mechanized flax harvesting, a comb-brush air-suction composite flax capsule harvesting test stand was designed based on the harvesting method of harvesting capsules independently and then breaking the capsules to thresh them. The following four parameters were selected as experimental factors: the shape of comb tooth cross-section, the rotational speed of comb roller, the relative speed of machine travel and the air volume of centrifugal fan. The following four indicators were chosen as the experimental indicators: capsule removal rate, capsule breakage rate, capsule collection rate and plant winding rate. A four-factor and three-level orthogonal test was conducted. The results showed that the optimal combination of test factors was as follows: the shape of comb tooth cross-section was rectangular, the rotational speed of the brush roller was 90 rad/min, the speed of machine travel relative to the plant was 80 mm/s and the air volume of centrifugal fan was 6000 m3/h. Under the condition of better experiment parameters combination, the capsule removal rate was 96.45%, capsule shell breaking rate was 98.79%, capsule collection rate was 95.65% and flax plants winding rate was 2.52%. The comb-brush air-suction composite flax capsule harvesting test bench provided the feasibility scheme for the problem of plant winding thresher roller and capsule collection.

367-372

Authors: Dejiang LIU, Yan GONG, Yingchun ZHU, Kehen YAO, Xiao CHEN, Guo WANG, Xiao ZHANG

Aiming at the trouble of low survival rate of cantaloupe seedling in hyperthermia, drought and dry land in Turpan region of China, the existing transplanting machine is the key to mechanized and non-destructive transportation and planting of large plants of young tender melon seedlings, root water injection, and precise soil piling in planting holes，and other technical difficulties. The design of mulch film planting cantaloupe transplanter for laying pipes belts and membranes, watering and transplanting, which can complete rotary tillage, spreading drip irrigation belts, laying mulch and covering the soil around the membrane, transplanting pot seedlings on the membrane, and water injection at the bottom. This machine puts the water injection pipeline under the inner side of the transplanter, and through the multi-point linkage electric control, the seedling preservation water is injected into the bottom of the seedlings pot while the seedlings are transferred, which not only ensures the survival rate of the melon seedlings, but also an accurate piling of the planting hole is realized. The technology of transplanting with water and piled soil for planting holes effectively solved the technical problems of mechanized transplanting of cantaloupe under high temperature and arid climate conditions in Turpan. After the cantaloupe seedlings were transplanted in dry land, the probability of survival was more than 96.9% after seven point five hours of drip irrigation. Operating efficiency can reach 0.067 hectares per hour, eight times as much as manual transplanting. The speed of transplanting machine is about 1.1 m/s, the quality of transplanting rate was 93.26 percent. The operating standards of these transplanters meet the agronomic requirements for transplanting cantaloupe.

383-394

Authors: Baiqiang ZUO, Shuqi SHANG, Xiaoning HE, Zenghui GAO, Wei LIU, Chunxiao ZHANG, Zhenjia MA, Dongwei WANG

For the peanut combine harvester excavation process resistance, poor soil crushing effect and poor reliability of the problem, the excavation shovel optimization needs improvement. Firstly, a mechanical model of the resistance of the excavation shovel was established to investigate the key factors affecting the degree of resistance of the excavation shovel. Next, the design of the main parameters of the excavation shovel was done to determine the range of values of the main factors affecting the peanut excavation shovel. EDEM software was used to simulate and analyse the excavation process and to explore the influence law of excavation shovel parameters on the resistance. Improvements were made to the excavation shovel, discrete element simulation tests were used to demonstrate that the optimized excavation device had better resistance reduction and soil crushing than the original device. By designing a three-factor, three-level orthogonal simulation test, the best parameters for the excavation shovel were obtained: the shovel surface inclination is 20°, the excavation depth is 131mm, and the shovel surface width is 277mm. Field trials were conducted under the optimal combination of parameters to test the reliability of the improved digging shovel. Compared with the operating effectiveness of the original machine, the result was improved to some extent. It proves that the optimized design of excavating shovel is reasonable and can improve the operation effect of peanut harvester.

406-414

Authors: Qiankun FU, Jun FU, Zhi CHEN, Luquan REN

In the harvest of lodged corn in hilly areas, the low position of corn ears and the large slope of the land caused severe losses. The comprehensive performance of loss reduction and terrain adaptability was studied on three small corn harvesters. The tested harvesters were 4-row 4YZP-4Y wheeled harvester, 2-row 4YZLP-2C crawler harvester and 2-row 4YZLP-2C-AF crawler harvester equipped with spiral lifers. The results showed that the all-speed corn ear loss and grain loss of the 4YZP-4Y harvester were 55.6% and 57.6% lower than those of the 4YZLP-2C harvester, while those of the 4YZLP-2C-AF harvester was 23.2% and 17.3%, lower than in the case of the 4YZLP-2C harvester. The all-height corn ear loss and grain loss of the 4YZP-4Y harvester were 35.2% and 56.6% lower than those of the 4YZLP-2C harvester, those of the 4YZLP-2C-AF harvester were 19.9% and 24.9% lower than in the case of the 4YZLP-2C harvester. The smaller header width and larger roller compacted area of the 4YZLP-2C harvester were the main factors that caused harvest loss. Wider harvester header, auxiliary feeding devices and smaller roller compacted area were key methods to reduce the harvest loss of lodged corn in hilly areas. This study provides technical scheme and design references for harvesters on lodged corn in hilly areas.

424-434

Authors: Yize SHI, Jiajia YU, Muhua LIU, Gaoliang ZHANG, Fan LU, Zhangxing QIN, Peng FANG, Xiongfei CHEN

Aiming at the poor performance and low efficiency of moist fertilizers, a cam-linkage self-cleaning fertilizer apparatus is designed. The cam-linkage mechanism matched with the self-cleaning device is applied to scrape off the residuals, and the structural parameters of flute cam in the wheel are obtained by using the polar equations. The physical characteristics of Stanley compound fertilizer, Kingenta compound fertilizer and Kingenta dual-effect nitro-fertilizer are analyzed to build the discharging model and obtain the key parameters, such as the wheel diameter, the groove number. The trajectory of fertilizer is introduced for the scraper plate. To evaluate the performance, a full factorial experiment including fertilizer types, moisture content and rotating speed is conducted, taking the discharging and coefficient of variation as the evaluation indicators. The results show that in the rotation of 10-50 r/min, the cam-linkage self-cleaning fertilizer apparatus could discharge compound fertilizers with a moisture content less than 8%, and the coefficient of variation is 0.12% -8.21%. In addition, the relationship between the rotating speed and the discharging has the linear relationship, and the determination coefficient R² are more than 0.974. This study helps promoting the deep fertilization technology and equipment in southern rice region.

448-456

Authors: Iulian ILIE

Equipment and methods for microfabrication and micromeasurements are under constant development. There are a multitude of possibilities to connect and control equipment for control and measurements adapted with the development of Industry 4.0. Using the terms Internet of Things, 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, collaborative robots, microfabrication, etc. and related applications are common in daily research and innovation activity. This paper presents the construction of a mechatronic system and the measurement procedures used in the working mode. Experimental results and their interpretation as well as the final conclusions of this paper are presented. The mecatronic system is intended for use in the main fields such as automotive, aeronautics, robotics, agriculture and others.

471-480

Authors: Mihai Gabriel MATACHE, Florin Bogdan MARIN, Carmela GURAU, Gheorghe GURAU, Mihaela MARIN, Iuliana GĂGEANU, Alexandru IONESCU

For negative effects minimization generated by agriculture on the environment, there were established a series of measures regarding the reduction of the amount of fertilizers and phytosanitary substances used. Thus, one of the innovative technologies appeared on the market is represented by the usage of some automated equipment for selective spraying of targeted plants, this way significantly reducing the amount of active substances used. The paper presents the usage of a technique specific to artificial intelligence for identification of target crops and their proper treatment. Thus, was developed a convolutional neural network formed of six neuron layers, which was used for analysis of crop field images recorded with a LOGITECH HD Pro C92.0 video camera. The network was developed in C++ programming language, using function libraries from OpenCV, and has run on a Dell laptop, with Intel i8 processor. Following images analysis and targeted plants identification, from laptop there are sent ON/OFF commands through an Arduino microcontroller toward the electrical microvalves mounted on the nozzles of a self-propelled electric spraying machine having a working width of 8 m, with the purpose of spot-spraying the crop plants and reducing the amount of used substances. In this paper are presented the experiments done for testing the neural network efficiency.

491-498

Authors: Tao ZHANG, Fei HAO, Yuge BI, Jianmin DU, Weiqiang PI, Yanbin ZHANG, Xiangbing ZHU, Xinchao GAO, Eerdumutu JIN

Accurate spatial distribution of grassland degradation indicator species is of great significance for grassland degradation monitoring. In order to realize the intelligent remote sensing grassland degradation monitoring task, this paper collects remote sensing data of three degradation indicator species of desert grassland, namely, constructive species, dominant species, and companion species, through the UAV hyperspectral remote sensing platform, and proposes a multi-feature fusion (MFF) classification model. In addition, vertical convolution, horizontal convolution, and group convolution mechanisms are introduced to further reduce the number of model parameters and effectively improve the computational efficiency of the model. The results show that the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the model can reach 91.81% and 0.8473, respectively, and it also has better classification performance and computational efficiency compared to different deep learning classification models. This study provides a new method for high-precision and efficient fine classification study of degradation indicator species in grasslands.

511-520

Authors: Zenghui GAO, Shuqi SHANG, Nan XU, Dansong YUE, Jinming ZHENG, Dongwei WANG

In order to improve the efficiency of peanut harvesting in China, realize the deep integration of agricultural machinery and agronomy in peanut production and promote the development of peanut industry. According to the research on peanut planting agronomy and plant biological characteristics, this paper focuses on the analysis of the clamping and collecting scheme of the three-ridge six-row peanut combine harvester, and designs the structure of the clamping and collecting device to solve the situation that the peanut clamping and collecting process is prone to congestion under large feeding volume. By analysing the forces on the peanut plant, the structure of the core fruit picking device has been designed, and the factors and parameters affecting the effectiveness of the peanut picking operation have been optimised through experimental research using the peanut leakage and crushing rates as indicators. The whole machine structure of the three-ridge six-row peanut combine harvester was designed to ensure that the peanut combine harvester can complete the processes of harvesting, digging, clamping and conveying, soil removal, collecting, fruit picking, cleaning and fruit collection at one time. Finally, through field tests on the three-ridge six-row peanut combine harvester, it was verified that the peanut leakage rate was 1.92% and the crushing rate was 0.84% at different forward speeds, and all of them were congested, which met the national peanut harvesting standards.

533-542

Authors: Volodymyr BULGAKOV, Roman ANTOSHCHENKOV, Valerii ADAMCHUK, Ivan HALYCH, Yevhen IHNATIEV, Ivan BELOEV, Semjons IVANOVS

When designing and determining the potential technical capabilities and characteristics of the tractor, the so-called traction calculation is carried out. The aim of the work is to study regularities of changes in the traction and coupling characteristics of a tractor with an articulated frame depending on the size of the ballast, the presence of dual wheels and other parameters, using the KhTZ-242K tractor as an example. The numerical solution of the deduced mathematical model made it possible to obtain graphical dependences of the change in the main traction and coupling characteristics of the tractor KhTZ-242K depending on the mass of the tractor, which varied from 8600 kg to 10100 kg by changing the ballast mass. The maximum tractive power of the tractor on single wheels without a ballast is 121 kW, which is achieved at a speed of 12 km∙h–1, and on single wheels with a ballast 122 kW, at a speed of 15 km∙h–1. This, in its turn, greatly affects the productivity and fuel efficiency of the aggregate.

549-558

Authors: Jin LI, Xiaolin FAN, Xianmin WANG, Risheng CHEN, Gangshun RAO, Tingting DUAN

The cultivation of salt-tolerant rice (sea rice) along beaches has become an effective measure for the restoration and utilization of saline-sodic land, so this paper studies the effects of irrigation and nitrogen fertilization on soil Na+ in root zone and sea rice yield, and provides a scientific basis for planting sea rice. A pot experiment (two-factor split plot) of sea rice with salt stress (10 g NaCl/kg soil) was carried out. The main plot consists of three types of irrigation methods: flooding irrigation (F), intermittent irrigation (I), and controlled irrigation (C). The subplots are three types of nitrogen fertilizers: urea (U), controlled-release urea (R), and mixed fertilizer (M) with U and R. The results showed: (1) The soil water-soluble Na+ of MI was significantly smaller than that of other treatments with NaCl, but the Ca2+/Na+ and Mg2+/Na+ were opposite. (2) The nitrogen uptake and dry weight of rice of MI were significantly larger than those of other treatments with NaCl, and were respectively 23% and 32% higher than UI, 49% and 16% higher than MF, 56% and 38% higher than UF, 75% and 61% higher than RI, 76% and 50% higher than RF. (3) The sea rice yield of MI was increased by 105%, 154%, 262%, 338%, and 428% compared with MF, RF, UF, RI, and UI, respectively. Therefore, the MI can effectively reduce the Na+ and increase the Ca2+/Na+ and Mg2+/Na+ in root layer soil, and promote the nitrogen absorption and production of sea rice. So the article recommends that M and I methods should be adapted to plant sea rice on coastal saline-sodic soil.

569-578

Authors: Mingjian RUAN, Hanlu JIANG, Haili ZHOU, Jun YE, Jinpeng HU

Aiming at the problems of poor applicability of traditional header height detection mechanism, poor stability and large lag of automatic control system of combine harvesters, an automatic control system of header height of combine harvester was designed, which mainly included the profiling mechanism, controller, proportional valve, manual operation handle and display module. The profiling detection mechanism was composed of angle sensor, profiling plate, torsion spring and other structures. The key structural parameters of the profiling mechanism were determined by using the Adams simulation software and its working performance was verified. The gray prediction PID algorithm of header height was used to reduce the lag of the control model. The control system detected the height of the header from the ground through the profiling mechanism. After being processed by the controller, the height of the header was changed by adjusting the expansion of the header oil cylinder. The field test results showed that the working performance of the header automatic control system was stable. Under the working conditions of preset header height of 100mm and 200mm, the average deviation of the control system was within 21 mm, which met the real-time control demand of header height during normal operation of combine harvester. This research could provide intelligent design methods of combine harvesters.

589-598

Authors: Shengqiao XIE, Yang BAI, Qilin AN, Jian SONG, Xiuying TANG, Fuxiang XIE

Crop diseases have an important impact on the safe production of food. Therefore, the automated identification of pre-crop diseases is very important for farmers to increase production and income. In this paper, a tomato leaf disease identification method based on the optimized MobileNetV2 model is proposed. A dataset of 20,400 tomato disease images was created based on tomato disease images taken from the greenhouse and obtained from the PlantVillage database. The optimized MobileNetV2 model was trained with the dataset to obtain a classification model for tomato leaf diseases. The average recognition accuracy of the model is 98.3% and the recall rate is 94.9%, which is 1.2% and 3.9% higher than the original model, respectively, after experimental validation. The average prediction speed of the model for a single image is about 76 ms, which is 2.94% better than the original model. To verify the performance of the optimized MobileNetV2 model, it was compared with the Xception, Inception, and VGG16 feature extraction network models using migration learning, respectively. The experimental results show that the average recognition accuracy of the model is 0.4 to 2.4 percentage points higher than that of the Xception, Inception, and VGG16 models. It can provide technical support for the identification of tomato diseases, and is also important for plant growth monitoring under precision agriculture.

607-616

Authors: Dezhi REN, Luji ZHANG, Wanyuan HUANG, Huiting CHENG, Tian'yi HE, Jun MENG

To realize the integrated technology of biochar return to the soil, the key components of the biochar discharge system applicable to the biochar return machine were designed, and the force analysis of the return shovel was carried out to obtain the main working parameters affecting the effect of biochar return. Single factor and multi factor simulation tests were conducted with the coefficient of variation of biochar content uniformity as evaluation indexes, and outlet distance, conduit diameter, baffle angle as influencing factors. The data were processed and parameters were optimized using Design-Expert, and the results were optimized and experimentally verified. The results from the experimental the coefficient of variation of biochar content uniformity and simulation data from the model showed good agreement. Therefore, the procedures of this study can be used for the integrated technology of biochar return.

629-640

Authors: Fandi ZENG, Xuying LI, Hongbin BAI, Ji CUI, Xuening LIU, Yongzhi ZHANG

The movement of plug seedlings and the pots damage mechanism are deeply studied during the planting process, and the planting components are optimized. The Tekscan pressure distribution measurement system was used to measure the mechanical characteristics of the drop impact between the whole plug seedlings and the pots. The relative error between the collision impact force of the plug seedlings and the collision impact force of the pot is less than 20%. Therefore, a drop impact test using the pot allows the whole plug seedling to be characterized. The Hertz-Mindlin with bonding model was used to build a simulation model of the pot based on essential physical parameters. The Plackett-Burman test and the steepest climbing test determined the significant parameters and optimal intervals affecting the collision impact force: the rolling friction coefficient between the pot and pot was 0.35~0.38, the bond stiffness was 0.2~0.6 MN·m-3, and the bond radius was 1.56~1.98 mm. Finally, the Box-Behnken test was performed and the quadratic regression model of the collision impact force was developed. Taking the collision impact force with a drop height of 350 mm as the target, the optimal solution is obtained: the rolling friction coefficient between the pot and pot was 0.35, the bond stiffness was 0.53 MN·m-3, and bond radius 1.97 mm. The average value was used for other insignificant influence parameters. The simulation results are compared with the physical test, and the relative error is 3.65%. Therefore, the pot model established by this simulation parameter can represent the actual drop impact of the pots.

649-658

Authors: Baiqiang ZUO, Shuqi SHANG, Xiaoning HE, Zelong ZHAO, Dongjie LI, Wei LIU, Xu LI, Dongwei WANG

In order to reduce the high resistance problem during peanut digging shovel operation and improve the soil loosening effect, a bionic peanut digging shovel was designed according to the streamlined profile of the head of the golden cicada, and the range of values of the digging operation parameters was analyzed. A discrete element model was developed to verify that the operational resistance of the bionic excavation shovel is lower than that of the flat shovel. The reliability of the simulation test was confirmed by conducting a resistance test on the excavation shovel through a soil trench test. A three-factor, three-water orthogonal combination test was designed to determine the optimal operating parameters of the excavation shovel: the bevel angle of the shovel blade was 55°, the digging depth was 130 mm, and the width of the shovel face was 309 mm. The paper can provide a reference for designing and optimizing peanut-digging shovels.

669-680

Authors: Solaf ABD EL-REHEEM, Mahmoud AWAD, Fatma ABD EL GAWAD, Mokhtar COTTB, Mahmoud OKASHA

The current study aimed to test and evaluate sheets’ different perforation shapes, brake angles, and milling durations to improve the quality of long-grain white rice from an abrasive milling machine. The investigated parameters of head rice yield, broken rice percentage, whitening degree, and rice bulk temperature were influenced by five sheets with five perforated shapes (horizontal, vertical, inclined, 1 mm round holes, and 1.5 mm round holes), three brake angles (0, 45, and 90º), and four milling durations (60, 70, 80, and 90 s). The results showed that the horizontal rectangular perforated sheet resulted in the highest value of head rice yield and the lowest value of broken rice. On the other hand, the vertical rectangular perforated sheet resulted in the highest whitening degree, followed by the inclined rectangular perforated sheet. The round holes (1.0 mm and 1.5 mm diameter) are not recommended for the long-grain whitening process because of the resulting high values of broken kernels, rice bulk temperature after the whitening process, and lower values of whitening degree. The brake angle of 90º resulted in the highest value of broken rice for all studied perforated sheets used in this study. This study recommended that the optimum operating conditions were using the horizontal rectangular perforated sheet, zero degree brake angle and milling duration of 80 s.

693-701

Authors: Wenlong LI, Jiahao YANG, Wenting JIN, Liuxuan MA, Yiyuan GE, Jinbo ZHANG, Yuqi ZHUANSUN

In order to explore the best parameters for the decomposition of corn straw for return to the field under extremely cold temperature conditions in northeast China, an orthogonal test was used to test the decomposition of corn straw and to analyse the effects of factors such as straw return depth, straw return amount, straw stalk part and decomposer concentration on the decomposition efficiency of corn straw. The results showed that the most significant effect on the decomposition efficiency of cold land corn straw was the amount of straw returned to the field, followed by the concentration of decomposer and the depth of straw returned to the field, and the least effect was the straw part. Among them, the amount of straw returned to the field showed a negative correlation on the decomposition efficiency of cold land corn straw; the concentration of decomposer, the depth of straw returned to the field and the straw part showed a positive correlation on the decomposition efficiency of cold land corn straw.

711-721

Authors: Zhu ZHAO, Zhongnan WANG, Bintong ZHAO, Yuqiu SONG, Mingjin XIN

The ant (Pheidole megacephala, Fabricius) has a unique and hard mandibular structure to cut branches and crush hard food. Inspired by this special geometric structure of the mandibular teeth, a stereoscopic microscope was used to view the image of the mandible of the ant. The Origin and AutoCAD software were used to obtain the outer profile of the mandibular teeth of the ant. The outer profile of the ant's mandibular teeth was fitted and expressed by five-order polynomial function. According to the analysis of the profile curve of the maxillary teeth, the fourth tooth is the most convex and the sharpest. The fourth tooth of the ant plays a key role in its feeding process, therefore, the structural parameters of the fourth maxillary tooth were selected as bionic elements for bionic blade design. To compare the cutting performance of the bionic and ordinary flat blades, the performance of bionic blade and the ordinary blade were conducted by using ANSYS software, the cutting force-deformation characteristics were tested using the Rapid TA practical texture analyser. The results of the element simulation showed that the mechanical properties of bionic blade were better than those of the ordinary blade. The results of the cutting experiments indicated that under the loading speed of 5 mm/s, the maximum cutting force of the bionic blade was 137.51 N, which is 12.17 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. The average cutting force of the bionic blade was 96.56 N, which is 11.58 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. The cutting energy consumption of the bionic blade was 9.68 J, which is 11.92 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. Under the loading speed of 10 mm/s, the maximum cutting force of the bionic blade was 143.88 N, which is 10.37 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. The average cutting force of the bionic blade was 101.03 N, which is 9.77 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. The cutting energy consumption of the bionic blade was 10.14 J, which is 9.95 % lower than that of the ordinary flat blade. The experimental results suggested that the bionic blade can effectively reduce the cutting force and energy consumption; thus, the bionic blade is more suitable for cutting stalks. These results will be helpful in the development of cutting elements for cutting and chopping of corn stover and other processing machinery.

729-734

Authors: Mustaqimah MUSTAQIMAH, Muhammad ANAS MUFTI, Ramayanty BULAN, Oscar HARIS

This study aims to determine the performance of a plastic mulch hole making machine and its electrical power requirements. The study begins by providing speed variations on the engine sprocket, calculating the working capacity of the machine, and analysing the power requirements of the electric motor. The results showed that the engine sprocket could perform an optimal rotation speed for punching holes in plastic mulch. Most holes were created in the treatment with a rotational speed of 70 rpm, 16 holes per 5 m of plastic mulch. Overall, the performance of the plastic mulch punching machine has been able to provide fixes in making holes in mulch plastic. Of the three treatments, the speed variations of the plastic mulch punching machine provided perforations with the criteria of perfect and partial perforation. The highest percentage of ideal perforation was found in the treatment with a rotational speed of 29 rpm, 86%, and the lowest was found in the treatment with a rotational speed of 25 rpm, 9.3%. The coefficient of determination between the rotational speed of the machine and the performance of the machine to punch holes in the plastic mulch can be modelled by a polynomial equation.

747-756

Authors: S.Şt. BIRIȘ, A-M. CONSTANTIN, D. ANGHELACHE, I. GĂGEANU, D. CUJBESCU, F. NENCIU, I. VOICEA, Gh. MATEI, L. D. POPA, M. F. DUȚU, N. UNGUREANU, T. ŻELAZIŃSKI, L. PERIŞOARĂ, G. FODOREAN

Vibrations are dynamic phenomena occurring in elastic or quasi-elastic media after a local excitation and becoming manifested by propagating the excitation within the medium in the form of some elastic oscillations. Thus, depending on the phenomenon dynamics, there can be met vibrations with low variation frequencies, characteristic to the mechanical structures, structures in constructions and earthquake waves, as well as vibrations with high variation frequencies. The vibration measuring is performed on a straw cereal harvesting machine with an axial threshing apparatus ("CASE IH") in two conditions: in a stationary position and during work, by using transducers for each of the main working parts of the harvester: thresher, header (stripper), chassis and operator's chair. On the basis of the values of longitudinal, cross and vertical accelerations, measured at various frequencies in the two operating conditions of the harvester (at stationary and during work), the effect of the vibrations is established on each of these parts and, finally, cumulated, the vibrations sent to the operator's chair, the nomograms following to be traced and to be established the range with the limits up to which these are not dangerous for the operator's health.

767-780

Authors: Muddassar SARFRAZ, Nicolae-Valentin VLĂDUŢ, Lucian-Ionel CIOCA, Larisa IVASCU

Recognizing the factors stimulating the student's academic performance requires investigating different learning strategies influencing teachers' self-efficacy. With the growing diversity of teaching methods, motivational and instructional strategies have gained significant attention, potentially leading educationists to use them as the critical benchmark of superior student performance. This study’s primary objective is to analyze the impact of teaching strategies on student academic performance while considering the mediating role of teachers' self-efficacy. The data was collected from 260 students from different universities and colleges by using the convenience sampling method. The study results reveal that motivational and instructional strategies significantly affect teacher self-efficacy and student academic performance. Teacher self-efficacy mediates the relationship between instructional strategies, motivational strategies, and student academic performance.

789-797

Authors: Kaixing ZHANG, Guoliang MA, Jingfeng LI,, Xiuyan ZHAO

In order to solve the problems of poor universality and complex structure of the current air-suction precision seed metering device for small vegetable seeds, an air-suction precision seed metering device based on the physical characteristics of small vegetable seeds was developed. The physical characteristics of several typical small vegetable seeds were measured to provide a theoretical basis for the design of air-suction precision seed metering device. Analyzed the force on the seed during seed metering, and used discrete element method to analyze the overall state of the seed at different times in combination with the basic structure. The experiment was designed with the pass rate, replay rate and miss rate as experimental indicators. The regression model was established to obtain the reasonable range of each parameter. The experimental results showed that when the rotary table speed was 28.65 r/min and the working negative pressure was 4.40 kPa, the seeding pass rate of the seed meter was 91.07%, the replay rate was 4.70%, and the missed rate was 4.23%.

809-816

Authors: Lili NIE, Fan JIAO, Tingting YANG, Zhenyu LIU

To investigate the mechanism of the movement law of sheep and theoretically support the study on the herd effect, a herd effect model based on the agent and cellular automata technology is built. The law of the herd effect is defined with the use of PyCharm for simulation, based on the characteristics of the flock tending to the top sheep. The flock activity area falls into several two-dimensional cell space structures, and the grid with the cell state of "sheep" in the cell space structure is considered a type of agent. The model assumed that there are five behaviors, including standing, walking slowly, looking for the leader, random and avoiding collisions in four scenarios. A herd effect model is built, the herd behavior is simulated, and the simulation results are compared with the actual herd behavior trajectory. The mean square error between the calculation model and the reality is 1.025. As revealed by the results, the model exhibits effective applicability, so it can better describe the trajectory of real herd behavior and provide theoretical guidance for the study on the herd effect.

827-834

Authors: Zhao FAN, Zhang JIAWEI, Zhi JIHAO

As a famous Chinese traditional medicine, the Astragalus polysaccharide (APS) market is continually expanding, while the quality of APS cannot be guaranteed. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been widely used in the detection of Chinese herbal medicines and traditional Chinese medicine. In this study, NIR spectroscopy was used to identify the adulterants of APS. Prepare adulterated mixtures of APS with 75%, and 50% content, respectively. PLS-DA and SIMCA models were developed for 2-classification of APS, APS mixture (75%+50%), and 3-classification of APS, 75% APS mixture and 50% APS mixture, respectively. In the 2-classification, the correct classification rate of both the calibration set and the test set of the PLS-DA and SIMCA models is 100%. In the 3-classification, the correct classification rates of calibration set and test set for PLS-DA were 97.5% and 96.67%, respectively; the correct classification rates of calibration set and test for SIMCA were 98.33% and 100%, respectively. The study showed that it is feasible to identify adulterated Astragalus polysaccharides using near-infrared spectroscopy.

844-852

Authors: Rong FAN, Wei LI, Zhiming WU, Bin BU

In order to reduce the drift loss of small droplets sprayed at low altitudes and low volume, a two-channel two-phase electric centrifugal nozzle was designed. The three-dimensional full-size numerical simulation of the flow field in the nozzle was carried out using Fluent software, and the radial distribution characteristics and axial variation of the flow field were studied. The relationships between the motor voltage and the atomizing disc's speed, between the nozzle's inlet pressure and its flow rate were determined. The variations of the droplet size and the droplet spectrum width with the atomizing disc and flow rate were revealed. The results showed that the rotation speed and flow rate were the important factors affecting the droplet's middle diameter and spectrum width. When the rotation speed of atomizing disc was 4000 r/min, the droplet spectrum width exhibited the narrowest, and the middle diameter of the droplet volume was 231.9 μm. The droplet coverage density was higher, meeting the requirements of low-volume aviation spraying control. This study provides a theoretical basis for optimizing nozzle configuration and developing variable spray devices.

861-872

Authors: Ying WANG, Xiao Jun QIAO, ZhiBin WANG

Ozone is a strong oxidant and strong disinfectant that has a strong anti-pathogenic effect on bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses. Because of its high reactivity, strong permeability, low residue, and other advantages, the application of ozone is gaining more and more attention, and ozone has been widely used in water treatment, equipment disinfection, public scene disinfection, and other fields. The purpose of this review is to discuss the use of ozone technology for animal and plant protection that can be applied to agriculture, and to emphasize the need for further studies to determine the optimal concentration and application of ozone for different crops so that, in the future, ozone technology can be applied in agriculture to gain a significant competitive advantage and improve product safety.

885-895

Authors: Yongfei SUN, Lei SHI, Fanting KONG, Qing XIE, Teng WU, Changlin CHEN

The working quality of a cotton stripper harvester is limited by the efficiency of onboard seed cotton cleaners. As a basis for research in the design of a cotton stripper harvester prototype, the bench cleaning tests were designed to study the effect of structural and technological parameters on the loss rate and impurities rate of the cleaner. According to the features of different test factors, a combined orthogonal test was applied to determine the best combination of the sawtooth distance, saw cylinder diameter, and cleaning distance. With these parameters fixed, the optimal parameters for the cleaning distance, saw cylinder rotating speed, and brush thickness were obtained using a quadratic-regression rotatable orthogonal test. The best parameter configuration to ensure the cleaning quality of the onboard seed cotton pre-cleaner included the following structural parameters: sawtooth distance of 38 mm and saw cylinder diameter of 340 mm, and technological parameters: rotating speed of 282–288 rpm, clearance of 12.55–14.84 mm, and brush thickness of 8.37–9.69 mm, which decreased the loss rate to less than 10% and the impurities rate to less than 6%. The reliability of the theoretical analysis results was verified by a comparison with experimental results. The experimental results provide a theoretical basis and technical reference for the research and the structural design of seed cotton pre-cleaners.

906-917

Authors: Xiangqian DONG, Huina ZHENG, Chen SU, Yonglei LI, Jiannong SONG, Jicheng WANG

In this paper, the vibration characteristics of the 1ST-460 vibration subsoiler was analyzed. In order to solve the problem of vibration imbalance caused by the vibration component under the action of multiple groups of vibration shovels, the optimal combination mode of the vibration component under the interaction of multiple groups of shovels was obtained. Piezoelectric accelerometers are fixed symmetrically on the frame of the subsoiler to measure the vibration at different positions. TST5910 dynamic signal test and analysis system is used to collect and process the acceleration data. Non-load tests were carried out with different initial eccentric phase angle combination. Results showed that the combination of [0°, 180°, 180°, 0°] (symmetrically up and down staggered vibration) for the eccentric vibration component of four shovels is the optimal initial phase combination, which can lead to the minimum adverse vibration on the frame. Further tests were conducted under different vibrating frequency and amplitude/eccentric with optimal phase combination. The results showed that, when amplitude/eccentricity ratio was 2.0 and 2.5, frequency of vibration was 6.7 and 8.3 Hz, the required traction force of the subsoiler was stable and significantly reduced, which can improve the soil loosening performance and reduce the harmful vibration on the tractor.