INMATEH - Agricultural Engineering

13-29

Authors: Ahmed M. EL-SHEIKHA, Mohamed R. DARWESH, Rashad HEGAZY, Mahmoud OKASHA, Nada H. MOHAMED

This study developed a hybrid solar greenhouse dryer (lean-to) incorporated with a solar collector and photovoltaic (PV) system for smallholder processors of tomatoes and evaluated the thermal performance of forced convection mixed-mode solar dryer with two pretreatments of fresh tomatoes (halves and slices) with salt and sugar. Tomatoes dipped in a 40% sucrose solution for 72 hours before drying exhibited a greater initial drying rate than those treated with salt. The hourly average incident solar radiation without a reflector was 673.8 (±214.2) W/m2 outside and 754.6 (±284.5) W/m2 inside the lean-to solar dehydrator during operation. The incident solar radiation in the collector ranged from 390.3 to 1156.0 W/m2, indicating higher levels at the tilt angle. The hourly average air temperatures outside and inside the solar dehydrator and solar collector during the experiment, respectively, were 30.7 (±2.3), 52.7 (±10.1), and 30.7 (±2.3), 79.7 (±26.9)°C for the salt treatment and 31.0 (±2.0), 55.1 (±15.3), and 31.0 (±2.0), 84.8 (±28.0)°C for the sugar treatment. Thus, the solar dehydrator and the solar collector raised the dehydrating air temperatures over the outside for the salt and sugar treatment by an average of 22.0, 49.0, 24.1, and 53.8ºC, respectively. The average hourly air-relative humidity inside the solar dehydrator was 33.5%, while outside was 47.2%. The pretreated tomatoes had an initial moisture content of 93.1% (w.b). The solar dehydrator's thermal efficiency was 72.21%, and its drying efficiency was 56.48%. Consequently, solar energy contributed 84.28 and 71.18% of the generated heating power. The solar dehydrator lost 15.72 and 28.82% of its remaining solar energy due to exhausted air. The solar dehydrator had a daily average energy of 59.375 kWh, and the heating power was 47.473 kWh during the experimental period (29 h).

40-49

Authors: Mingxu WANG, Haojun ZHAO, Saiqiang LI, Jiangfeng OUYANG, Junyong WU, Hengda ZHANG

To address the issues of poor timeliness and delayed feedback in traditional wheat milling processes for manual particle size detection, a wheat milling online particle size detection device has been designed. This paper focuses on the design optimization of the key feeding component in the device, which affects the accuracy of particle size detection. The feeding component adopts shaftless screw blades. Through theoretical analysis, the main parameter ranges affecting the throughput capacity of the shaftless screw conveyor are determined. A Box-Behnken experiment is designed to obtain the optimal parameter combination for each factor: outer diameter of screw blades 23.8 mm, inner diameter of screw blades 6.4 mm, pitch 11.2 mm, and blade rotation speed 288.9 r/min. Simulation and test stand experiments are conducted using the above parameter combination. The simulation results show that the average throughput capacity of the feeding component is 2.85 kg/h, while the average throughput capacity of the test stand experiment is 2.84 kg/h, with a coefficient of variation of uniformity of 1.33%. These results indicate that the above parameter combination meets the design requirements for the feeding component in the device.

63-72

Authors: Jinliang GONG, Zengjia LUO, Yanfei ZHANG

Aiming at the high crushing rate and impurity rate of corn kernel machine harvesting in the Huanghuaihai region, a longitudinal flow conical variable pitch threshing device is designed, which adopts the combined threshing element of "plate teeth + ribs" and the combined threshing concave plate of "leftward round tube type + vertical round tube type". The cob model was established, and the force analysis of the cob threshing process was carried out, and the type of threshing drum and the installation angle of the threshing concave plate round tube were determined as the main influencing factors, and the collision force on the corn cob was taken as the test index. Using EDEM discrete element simulation software, simulation tests were carried out on different types of threshing drums and threshing concave plates with different installation angles of round tubes with corn cobs, and the better threshing method was finally determined: a conical threshing drum at a drum speed of 450 r/min, and a combination of left-facing round-tube-type+vertical round-tube-type threshing concave plates with an installation angle of 10° (front-sparse and back-dense type) were used. Compared with the vertical circular tube type threshing concave plate, the corn cob contact force decreased from 313.5N to 247.3N, which was optimal for threshing in the range allowed by the corn kernel destructive force.

84-93

Authors: Yonghui DU, Ang GAO, Yuepeng SONG, Jing GUO, Wei MA, Longlong REN

The intelligent detection of young apple fruits based on deep learning faced various challenges such as varying scale sizes and colors similar to the background, which increased the risk of misdetection or missed detection. To effectively address these issues, a method for young apple fruit detection based on improved YOLOv5 was proposed in this paper. Firstly, a young apple fruits dataset was established. Subsequently, a prediction layer was added to the detection head of the model, and four layers of CA attention mechanism were integrated into the detection neck (Neck). Additionally, the GIOU function was introduced as the model's loss function to enhance its overall detection performance. The accuracy on the validation dataset reached 94.6%, with an average precision of 82.2%. Compared with YOLOv3, YOLOv4, and the original YOLOv5 detection methods, the accuracy increased by 0.4%, 1.3%, and 4.6% respectively, while the average precision increased by 0.9%, 1.6%, and 1.2% respectively. The experiments demonstrated that the algorithm effectively recognized young apple fruits in complex scenes while meeting real-time detection requirements, providing support for intelligent apple orchard management.

110-118

Authors: Hao WANG, Xiaobo ZHOU, Xiayu WU, Yuling DAN, Hongchun CHU, Jin CHEN

A small-scale paddy rice transplanter for hilly and mountainous areas faces issues such as few suitable machines, poor transplanting results, and low adaptability and efficiency of large transplanters in small fields. To address these problems, a four-row small-scale paddy rice transplanter was designed, driven by an engine with chain transmission. The machine structure mainly consists of a frame, engine, paddy field wheels, seedling tray, transplanting mechanism, reversing gearbox, and electromagnetic clutch, with a total weight of only 50 kg, facilitating transportation and operation. MATLAB was used for kinematic simulation and analysis of the transplanting mechanism, plotting displacement diagrams of the seedling needles and motion characteristic curves of the transplanting mechanism. ANSYS software was employed for finite element analysis of key components to ensure they meet operational requirements. Experimental studies were conducted with transplanting speed as the experimental factor, using floating rate and missing insertion rate as test indicators. Results showed that under specified transplanting conditions, the floating rate stabilized at around 2.9% and the missing insertion rate at approximately 4.8%. These findings indicate that the designed small-scale transplanter can effectively meet the requirements for rice transplanting operations in hilly areas.

129-138

Authors: Miao XU, Xuan ZHANG, Na MA, Yanwen LI

In order to achieve efficient and accurate detection of common corn leaf diseases such as leaf blight, gray spot disease, and rust, a corn leaf disease detection method based on CA-YOLOv8 was proposed. In this method, the Coordinate Attention(CA) attention mechanism was added after the feature map output from the Neck part to enhance the feature extraction capability of the model. The experimental results showed that the precision，recall and mean average precision(mAP) of the CA-YOLOv8 model on the test set were 94.08%, 90.53% and 97.38%, respectively. Compared with the YOLOv8, YOLOv8+SE and YOLOv8+CBAM models, the mAP was improved by 2.15, 0.86 and 2.35 percentage points, respectively. Compared with Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5s, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 models, the mAP has increased by 63.53, 29.24, 3.21, and 2.15 percentage points, respectively. The study showed that the CA-YOLOv8 model can provide a technical reference for the development of a portable intelligent corn leaf disease detection system.

149-161

Authors: Tianhua LI, Yinhang DONG, Guoying SHI, Guanshan ZHANG, Chao CHEN, Jianchang SU

Accurate prediction of environmental changes in Agaricus bisporus cultivation is essential for better managing climatic conditions within mushroom houses, ultimately enhancing the yield and quality of Agaricus bisporus. However, traditional control systems for Agaricus bisporus production environments can only monitor the current conditions and lack the ability to predict environmental changes, leading to issues such as delayed feedback on environmental data and the effectiveness of control measures. In response to these challenges, this study establishes a temperature and humidity prediction model based on the DOA-BP algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the DOA optimization algorithm exhibits strong global search capabilities. By rapidly searching for optimal weights and biases, it overcomes the drawback of the BP neural network getting stuck in local minima, accelerates network convergence, and improves the performance of the BP neural network. The MAE values for temperature and humidity prediction inside the mushroom house are 0.021 and 0.013, respectively. The RMSE values are 0.044 and 0.038, respectively, and the R2 values are 0.976 and 0.968, respectively. Through validation, the DOA-BP temperature and humidity prediction model proposed in this study accurately predicts the temperature and humidity inside mushroom houses. This model can enhance environmental control for cultivation, optimize resource utilization, and reduce production costs effectively.

176-190

Authors: Jie LIU, Fanxia KONG, Zhao JIE, Lili Yi, Yubin LAN, Xin HAN, Minhui ZHANG, Lei LIU, Pengcheng LV

In order to solve the problems of low correlation between variable fertilizer application system and soil nutrient content detection and insufficient real-time performance, a variable fertilizer application system based on real-time soil nutrient content detection was developed. This paper describes the structure, working principle and design of key components of the soil information acquisition and fertilizer application system. It includes the simulation and analysis of fertilizer application using the discrete element method and the selection of curved blade fertilizer application discs. The system uses STM32F429IGT6 microcontroller and ROS higher-level computer for decision making. The device detects soil nutrients in real time, adjusts the fertilizer motor speed accordingly, and runs autonomously along the planned path. The decision coefficient R^2 between the fertilizer application rate and the speed of the fertilizer application wheel is not less than 0.97, and the relative error between the actual fertilizer application rate and the theoretical fertilizer application rate is up to 5.91%, with the maximum value of the coefficient of variation (CV) of 10.18%. The indoor bench test shows that the relative error between the actual fertilizer application rate and the target fertilizer application rate within a single operating grid is up to 6.2%, with the maximum value of CV being 6.64%. The field test in the orchard showed that the maximum relative error between the actual fertilizer application and the target fertilizer application in a single operation grid was 6.3%, and the maximum value of CV was 12.34%, and the fertilizer application was completed in the operation grid, which demonstrated that the device was able to realize real-time and accurate variable fertilizer application according to the soil nutrient information.

201-212

Authors: Yuanqi LIU, Bin QI, Tengyun MA, Yuchao REN, Jiyuan SUN, Bohan ZHANG

In order to make the tractor better meet the needs of users under the premise of satisfying the use of functions, the Kano - AHP model is used to design the appearance of the tractor. Firstly, the emotional needs of users are collected, and the tractor modeling is designed according to the requirements combined with the Kano model. The design scheme is displayed through Rhino in the form of three-dimensional modeling. According to the design requirement index summarized by Kano model, the tractor modeling hierarchical structure model was established by using analytic hierarchy process, the weights of each index were obtained, and the best design scheme was selected according to the weights. Finally, the selected best scheme was imported into Jack ergonomics simulation software for stress analysis and comfort analysis of the lower back, and the analysis results were used to check whether the scheme met the man-machine physiological standards.

227-238

Authors: Qiuyan LIANG, Zihan ZHAO, Jingye SUN, Tianyue JIANG, Ningning GUO, Haiyang YU, Yiyuan GE

When maize is afflicted by pests and diseases, it can lead to a drastic reduction in yield, causing significant economic losses to farmers. Therefore, accurate and efficient detection of maize pest species is crucial for targeted pest control during the management process. To achieve precise detection of maize pest species, this paper proposes a deep learning detection algorithm for maize pests based on an improved YOLOv8n model: Firstly, a maize pest dataset was constructed, comprising 2,756 images of maize pests, according to the types of pests and diseases. Secondly, a deformable attention mechanism (DAttention) was introduced into the backbone network to enhance the model's capability to extract features from images of maize pests. Thirdly, spatial and channel recombination convolution (SCConv) was incorporated into the feature fusion network to reduce the miss rate of small-scale pests. Lastly, the improved model was trained and tested using the newly constructed maize pest dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved model achieved a detection average precision (mAP) of 94.8% at a speed of 171 frames per second (FPS), balancing accuracy and efficiency. The enhanced model can be deployed on low-power mobile devices for real-time detection, which is of great significance for the healthy development of maize agriculture.

249-262

Authors: Minhui ZHANG, Pengcheng LV, Jie LIU, Lei LIU, Huibin ZHU, Lili YI

This paper proposes a local path planning algorithm method named S-TEB (Smooth Time Elastic Band), aimed at fulfilling the requirement of full coverage for ORLMs (Orchard Robotic Lawn Mowers) during mowing operations. Firstly, by analyzing the tracking control mode of ORLMs in operational scenarios, control points are selected reasonably. Subsequently, utilizing B-spline curves, the path is optimized to generate the optimal trajectory and speed for ORLMs that satisfy multiple objectives and constraints. Finally, multiple simulations and field experiments were conducted in actual operational environments, with a speed of 0.6 m/s. Experimental results show that in scenarios involving obstacle avoidance, the minimum distance between the automatic lawnmower and the outer contour of obstacles is 4 cm. Compared to the traditional TEB planning algorithm, there is a 4.23% increase in mowing coverage area. These findings provide theoretical and technical support for local path planning in the operational scenarios of ORLMs.

275-284

Authors: Arshaluys TARVERDYAN, Artur ALTUNYAN, Gevorg HARUTYUNYAN, Аlbert GRIGORYAN

The article consideres the issue of dynamic and energy analysis of the rotary tiller with planetary transmission gear and vertical rotation axis designed for orchards and vineyards. In the result of investigations, analytical expressions have been derived, which enable to determine the resistance force factors of the cultivated medium affecting the rotary tiller and to set up their changing patterns during a single rotation of the rotor in conditions of forward movement of the aggregate/working unit. It has been confirmed that in case of binary symmetric blades located at 120 degree, the resistance forces transmitted from the tiller satellites to the rotor shaft mutually balance each other, as a result of which the traction resistance force of the unit receives the possible minimum value. As regard to the resistance moments transmitted from the tiller satellites to the rotor shaft and to their main moments, it should be noted that they change significantly during a single rotation of the rotor. Particularly, the extreme values of the main moment for each tiller satellite are obtained at the finite points of the rotor’s diameter perpendicular to the forward movement of the tillage machine. Based on the driving and resistance force factors of the machine, as well as the differential equation of the motion, the term has been identified by means of the energy research of the rotary tiller, in case of which the angular acceleration of the rotor’s shaft will be equal to zero and the machine will operate without oscillations and vibrations.

299-309

Authors: Tiejun WANG, Peng YIN, Li DU, Rui ZHOU, Yuanjuan GONG, Hongguang CUI

In order to solve the problem of poor mixing effect of inclined spiral conveyor, this paper designed an inclined spiral and ribbon blade combination conveying device. The mechanics and kinematics analysis of the movement process of the material unit in each mechanism was carried out, on which key devices and components were designed based. Effects of the speed of main shaft (X1), the full coefficient (X2) and the angle of inclination (X3) on the mixing uniformity (Y1) and the residual rate of material (Y2) were explored. Three-dimensional quadratic regression orthogonal rotation central combination experiment method combined with response surface method was used to conduct experiments and explore the interaction effects of influence factors on indicators. A regression model of influence factors and evaluation indicators was established through the analysis of variance. The significant factors affecting Y1 were ordered of X3, X2, X1, and the significant factors affecting Y2 were ordered of X2, X1, and X3. In the interaction of factors, X1X2 had a significant impact on Y1 and Y2; X1X3 had an extremely significant impact on Y1; X2X3 had an extremely significant effect on Y1 and a significant impact on Y2. The optimal structure and working parameters combination were determined to be 50 rpm for the speed of main shaft, 60% for the full coefficient, and 19° for the angle of inclination, while the verification experiments demonstrated that the mixing uniformity and residual rate of material corresponding to the verification test were 90.37% and 5.31%, respectively. The inclined device with combined spiral and ribbon blade developed in this study meets the design requirements for the misprocess of the fertilizer utilization of agricultural organic wastes.

324-337

Authors: Qiaofei MU, Haiqing TIAN, Ziqing XIAO, Chunxiang ZHUO, Xiaoyu XUE, Leifeng TANG

The complex vibration field in agricultural equipment during field operations not only predisposes key mechanical components to fatigue failure, but also leads to crop losses. This study introduces the Operating Transfer Path Analysis (OTPA) method to identify the vibration sources in the pickup header of a straw forage harvester. Finite element modal analysis, vibration testing, and operating transfer path analysis were conducted on the header frame. The findings indicate that excitation sources, including the hammer claw device, transmission, and dust box on the pickup header, are prone to resonant coupling with the header frame. The analysis reveals that the right transmission output shaft contributes 18.3% to the vertical vibrations on the right side panel of the frame. Meanwhile, the left transmission output shaft accounts for 29.4% of the horizontal vibrations on the left side panel. Additionally, the transmission input end is responsible for 54.8% of the horizontal vibrations on the front beam, while the dust box end contributes 45% to the forward vibrations on the rear beam. By identifying the primary transmission paths, the most effective strategies for the vibration reduction and optimization design of the pickup header can be developed. Furthermore, this study offers a theoretical foundation and experimental references for the vibration reduction optimization of other agricultural machinery.

351-363

Authors: Liangchen HOU, Xin HAN, Yubin LAN, Jingbo BAI, Zhikang DING, Xuejian ZHANG, Maochang SONG, Kailu WANG

In order to solve the problem that the wind field disturbs the trajectory of falling seeds and causes the seeds to be unable to be arranged in equidistant rows when the UAV is spreading rice, a shot seeding device that can sow five rows of pelleted rice seeds at the same time was designed. The unit is centered on an external grooved wheel seed metering device and a seed acceleration unit for row seeding and hole sowing. The airflow simulation of the rotor wind field of the UAV was carried out by simulation software to explore the changes in the wind field of the UAV during operation. The position where the wind field disturbance is minimized is chosen for the seed guide tube arrangement. The position with the least wind field disturbance is chosen to arrange the seed guide tube and combine it with a seed acceleration device to reduce the influence of the UAV wind field airflow on the direction of seed movement. The operational effectiveness of the seeding device with and without wind was verified by an indoor test and an outdoor flight seeding test, respectively. Simulation results show that: when the mouth of the seed guide pipe is 0.9 m away from the paddle, the wind field has the smallest influence on the sowing results. The results of the bench test show that: when the rotational speed is 30-45 r/min, the coefficient of variation of the discharge rate of each row (CVR) and total seed discharge rate stability (CVT) are less than 1.98% and 0.84%, and the seed breakage rate is less than 0.95%, which all conform to the UAV fly sowing industry standards. The outdoor mud box test shows that: when the baffle angle changes by 26%, 58%, and 71%, each slot wheel hole can store 5-10, 3-5 and 1-3 seeds respectively, and the UAV operates at a speed of 2 m/s-3 m/s, the pass rate of hybrid rice is greater than 86%, which meets the agronomic requirements of rice sowing operation.

375-382

Authors: Liangyu YUAN, Jun GE, Chengmao CAO, Kuan QIN, Yan SUN, Liangfei FANG

In order to investigate the soil reactions influenced by the single plate with the inclination angles from 0° to 75°, an in-house code of 2D DEM has been developed in this study. An iron flat plate penetrated soil by a constant velocity of 1 mm/s in the study. In the penetration test, the maximum vertical force was 753.8 N which was generated by the 0° plate. In addition, it was found that the less the inclination angle, the greater the vertical force. Furthermore, a greater force in the horizontal direction has been generated at 45° of the inclination angle. This research can provide a theoretical reference for optimizing tools that contact soil, for example, patterns/lugs on wheels, earthmoving blades (such as rotary cultivators, bulldozers, weeding machines etc.) and grouser of tracks.

391-405

Authors: Guoqiang DUN, Chaoxia ZHANG, Xinin JI, Qingjun MENG, Quanbao SHENG, Lei WANG

Physical property parameter measurements and simulation model parameter calibrations of Pak Choi seeds were conducted to address the lack of accurate parameters for discrete elemental seed discharging simulation tests in the seed-metering device. Firstly, physical tests were utilized to determine the basic physical parameters and contact parameters of Pak Choi seeds. The results of these physical tests served as the basis for determining the range of simulation parameters. The Plackett-Burman test was employed to screen out factors that significantly affected the simulated angle of repose from the test parameters, including static friction coefficient between Pak Choi seeds-Pak Choi seeds and rolling friction coefficient between Pak Choi seeds-Pak Choi seeds. The optimal interval of these two factors was determined using the Steepest Climb Test. Subsequently, the regression equation between the significance parameters and the angle of repose was obtained through the Central Composite Designs test, and the best parameter combinations were obtained with the measured stacking angle of 24.3° as the optimisation target value: Pak Choi seeds-Pak Choi seeds static friction coefficient of 0.486, Pak Choi seeds-Pak Choi seeds rolling friction coefficient of 0.104. Finally, simulation and bench comparison tests were carried out for stacking angle and Pak Choi seed discharger performance evaluation. The relative error of the angle of repose was found to be 0.288%, while average relative errors for qualified sowing rate, replanting rate, and missed sowing rate were all less than 5%. These results demonstrate that calibrated Pak Choi seed simulation parameters are reliable and can serve as a reference for design optimization of Pak Choi seed dischargers in academic research writing standards.

416-426

Authors: Elena SURDU, Dana-Claudia FARCAȘ-FLAMAROPOL, Radu I. IATAN, Petru CÂRDEI, Nicoleta SPOREA, Gheorghița TOMESCU, Ion DURBACĂ

The article presents results obtained for the thermal characterization of composite materials with clay matrix and inserts from agricultural waste (MCMLIDA). The experiments carried out led to the estimation of the coefficient of thermal conductivity of the bricks made from the MCMLIDA composite material. MCMLIDA composite materials have physical properties dependent on the parameters of the manufacturing process, one of the most important being the concentration of the insert. MCMLIDA materials were tested for eleven insert concentrations and four types of inserts (maize cobs, walnut husks, wheat straw, wool). Only the materials with the first two types of inserts had the necessary cohesion for the experiments over the entire range of concentrations (0-50%). It was found that the values of the conductivity coefficient of those materials were between 0.4 and 0.8 W/(mK), values that placed them in the area of good insulating materials from a thermal point of view. It was also observed that thermal conductivity increased (along with a decrease in insulating capacity) as the amount of insertion in the matrix was increased.

435-452

Authors: Qing WANG, Dandan HAN, Lin CHEN, Yuxia HUANG, Wei LI, Chao TANG

The DEM (discrete element method) simulation and optimization of the shapes and quantity of spoons of spoon-wheel disc in the spoon-wheel seed-metering device under vibrational conditions are investigated in this paper. EDEM (Engineering-DEM) software was adopted to establish DEM models of ‘Zhongyu No.3’ coated maize seeds and the spoon-wheel seed-metering device first, and four additional spoons of various shapes (labeled as K1~K5, respectively) were designed. The test results indicated that the acceleration of seeds in the Y-direction in spoons (K2~5) was all less fluctuating than those in the original spoon (K1), and the multiple rate was the largest in spoon (K5). The ultimate optimal working speed of the spoon-wheel maize precision planter in southwest China was identified as 3 km/h, with 22 spoons and the ideal spoon shape being K3. The bench validation test was executed under vibrational conditions based on the optimal spoon structure and operation settings. The qualified rate exceeded 94.5% at an operating speed of 3~4 km/h, while the multiple rate was less than 4%, the leakage rate was lower than 1.5%, and the variation coefficient was smaller than 25.5%. The variety adaptability test was launched when the working speed was 3 km/h. The qualified rates of various maize varieties were all more than 96.5%; the multiple and leakage rates were both less than 2%, which satisfied the technical requirements of maize precision sowing in southwest China. The qualified rates of various maize varieties were all more than 96.5%, and the multiple and leakage rates were both less than 2%, which satisfied the technical requirements of maize precision sowing in southwest China.

463-472

Authors: I Wayan BUDIASTRA, Sutrisno MARJAN, Nissa ADIARIFIA, Inna NOVIANTY, Yunisa Tri SUCI

The study used near-infrared reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy and hybrid calibration methods to predict oil and free fatty acid (FFA) content of Oil Palm Fruitlets (OPF) non-destructively. The reflectance and chemical content of OPF were measured and the calibration between NIR spectra and chemical content was performed using hybrid calibration methods (PLS-ANN, PCA-ANN). The best models to predict oil and FFA content of OPF respectively were the hybrid model of PLS-ANN with 25 Factor Components (FC) (R2 = 0.96; SEP= 2.21%, RPD = 4.79) and 19 FC (R2 = 0.96; SEP= 0.25%, RPD = 4.24) using Savitzky-Golay first derivative spectra pre-treatment.

487-500

Authors: Yueqi MA, Ruijuan CHI, Yantao ZHAO, Chao BAN, Tong SU, Zhengrong LI

The accuracy of curved path-tracking for headland turning of transplanters is crucial to maintaining the row spacing precision required for rice planting. To address this issue, a method based on H-infinity state feedback control is proposed. In this method, the requirement of robustness is transformed into linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to optimize the gain coefficients of the control law. The simulation test show that this method outperforms the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) when facing uncertain parameters (longitudinal speed and cornering stiffness) and path curvature disturbance. In addition, the field test results show that when the transplanter tracks a 1/4 circular arc path with a radius of 2 meters, the mean value of the absolute lateral error and the absolute heading angle error using this controller are 0.029 m and 3.69°, respectively. The maximum absolute lateral error is 0.072 m, and 64% of the absolute lateral error are less than 0.04 m, meeting practical requirements. Compared with the LQR controller with feed forward control, the mean value of the absolute lateral error is reduced by 36%. This method meets the accuracy and robustness requirements for unmanned rice transplanter turning at the headland.

513-523

Authors: Mengxiang TAN, Yan HE, Xuanke WU, Yucong LI, Wei HUANG, Ying XIE

Using the staged sowing experiment data and rice quality data of the specialized forage rice "Zhongzao 39"(hereinafter referred to as "Z-39") conducted in Nanning, Guangxi, combined with climate and geographic information data, the meteorological factors that play a key role in the formation of rice quality for the specialized forage rice "Z-39" are screened and determined. Based on the actual planting of specialize forage rice in Guangxi and the critical disaster causing indicators of "Z-39" specialize forage rice, the climate quality zoning index of "Z-39" is determined. GIS fine grid spatial simulation analysis method is used for refined spatial simulation analysis on key meteorological factors. The zoning indicator method and path analysis method are fully used for refined level zoning of the climate quality of Guangxi specialized forage rice "Z-39". It includes three levels: optimal, high-quality, and suboptimal. Ultimately, a refined zoning map for the climate quality of "Z-39" is developed, and the results are in line with the actual situation of forage rice cultivation in Guangxi. The aim is to provide a scientific basis for the rational planning and sustainable development of the specialized forage rice "Z-39" in Guangxi.

534-545

Authors: Wenliang LIU, Changyou WEI, Feng LIU, Caiyu JIANG, Fei PENG, Jiaqi WANG

In this paper, a screening machine was designed to remove the impurities in the tuber harvest, which integrates the functions of vibration screening, air separation, and flexible polishing. Discrete element simulation analysis was carried out to investigate the movement of tuber harvest and soil in the machine and the effect of polishing and removing impurities, the rationality of the structure, and the size were verified. Orthogonal tests were designed and carried out, with the rate of impurity, loss, and crushing as indicators and crank speed, impeller speed, and polishing roller speed as factors. The optimum working parameters were obtained: crank speed 280.12 r/min, impeller speed 1056.27 r/min, polishing roller speed 405.02 r/min, the impurity content was 0.29%, the loss rate was 1.01%, and the breakage rate was 0.11%. Through experimental verification, the actual value and theoretical value are basically the same, which verifies the rationality.

559-568

Authors: Xia LI, Xuhui WANG, Jinyou XU, Xinglong LI, Zhangjun JIANG, Birong YOU

The current field of pneumatic subventing prediction focuses on a single task and neglects the possible interrelationships between different outputs. In order to improve the prediction accuracy and reduce the number of algorithm model establishment, this study conducted field experiments on soil in autumn and winter. Neural network algorithms RBF (radial basis neural network), BP (backward propagation neural network), DNN (Deep learning network) and CNN (Convolutional neural network) were used to make multi-output regression prediction for changing the traction resistance and disturbance area affected by different levels of subsooning velocity, depth and pressure value in the process of pneumatic subsooning. The evaluation indexes RMSE, MAE and R2 were compared with the single output regression model, and the accuracy of the four models with the highest accuracy was compared with that of its own single output model to prove the correlation between traction resistance and disturbance area. The results showed that the R2 of the four model test sets of RBF, BP, DNN and CNN were 0.9999, 0.9966, 0.9986 and 0.9762, respectively. The R2 of the disturbance area are 0.9997, 0.9924, 0.9968 and 0.9715, respectively. RBF has the highest R2 and the lowest RMSE and MAE, indicating that the RBF model has the best prediction effect. Compared with the single output regression model of RBF model, the prediction accuracy of both outputs is higher, so it can be used to predict the subsoiling drag resistance and disturbance area.

581-591

Authors: Man CHEN, Zhichang CHANG, Chengqian JIN, Yinyan SHI

Studying the effect of variable fertilization during the jointing stage on winter wheat production in the rice-wheat rotation area is critical for evaluating the application effect and economic benefits of variable fertilization technology. The variable fertilization experiment of wheat was carried out in Jiangsu province by using the self-developed fertilizer applicator. Three fertilization methods were used to conduct a comparative analysis of the fertilization amount, population structure, and yield of winter wheat during the jointing stage. On this basis, the economic feasibility of variable fertilization during the jointing stage was evaluated. The experimental results showed that the control accuracy of variable-rate fertilization with fertilization equipment was greater than 95%. After variable fertilization, the coefficient of variation of NDVI values in the winter wheat canopy spectral data remained between 0.076 and 0.125, and the Christensen uniformity coefficient remained between 0.901 and 0.940. Compared with the traditional empirical balance method for quantitative fertilization of plots, the real-time variable fertilization plot used 13.6 kg/hm2 less fertilizer during the jointing stage. The findings validate that implementing variable fertilization can help reduce nitrogen fertilizer input, improve nitrogen fertilizer utilization efficiency, reduce environmental pollution, and enhance the sustainability of agricultural production.

603-612

Authors: Guangfei XU, Qun SUN, Meizhou CHEN, Jian WU, Jiwei FENG, Peisong DIAO, Chenqiang YIN

To solve the problem of poor steering performance of existing self-driving tractors based on electro-hydraulic coupled steering systems (E-HCSS) under multiple influencing factors, the research on electro-hydraulic coupled steering characteristics of self-driving tractors was carried out in this paper. Taking the electro-hydraulic coupled steering system as the research object, the E-HCSS test bench of the tractor was built, and the influencing factors affecting the responsiveness of the steering process were obtained through theoretical analysis: hydraulic fluid temperature, oil supply pressure and driving speed. The hydraulic fluid temperature, oil supply pressure and driving speed were taken as the test factors, and the steering system response time and response error were taken as the performance indexes for the single-factor steering test and orthogonal test. By establishing the regression mathematical model between the influencing factors and the indexes, the interactive influence of the factors on the indexes was analyzed, the optimal parameter combination was obtained, and the optimization results were verified. The test results indicated that the tractor electro-hydraulic coupling steering system could achieve good steering performance under the optimal parameter combination, and the optimal parameter combination was: hydraulic oil temperature 60°C, hydraulic oil pressure 15 MPa and driving speed 8 km/h. The study's results were as follows: hydraulic oil temperature 60°C, hydraulic oil pressure 15 MPa and driving speed 8 km/h. The study's results could provide a reference for the steering control of the self-driving tractor, the design of the self-driving steering system and the optimization of the parameters.

624-635

Authors: Bojun CAO, Tianlin ZUO, Bei WU, Tianci HUANG, Huaiyuan QIAN

The protein content of alfalfa leaves surpasses that of stems significantly, rendering harvested alfalfa following stems-leaves separation a valuable resource for livestock feed, thus ensuring the provision of high-quality raw materials for production. This study introduces a novel process for stems-leaves separation, alongside the establishment of a suspension velocity experiment rig aimed at investigating and determining the suspension velocity of alfalfa leaves, stems, and plants across various moisture levels. The relationship among various factors including different alfalfa components, the length of lateral branches, stem lengths, Moisture Content (MC), and suspension velocity was empirically derived through experimentation. In this study, the chopping and blowing method was proposed, where the alfalfa was cut into pieces according to a certain length, and then the alfalfa was blown apart by generating airflow through a fan. To comprehensively analyze the impact of airflow velocity and cutting length on the Separation Evaluation Index, a response surface mathematical model was developed. The empirical findings indicate optimal stems and leaves separation of alfalfa when the airflow velocity reaches 4.29556 m/s, paired with a cutting length of 33.7956 mm. Conclusively, this experiment validates the efficacy of the chopping and blowing separation method for alfalfa stems and leaves segregation, thereby offering valuable insights into alfalfa stems and leaves separation practices. The outcomes of this study hold significant reference value for the broader alfalfa agricultural domain.

647-657

Authors: Mingda HE, Xinyan YANG

The farmland in the southwestern mountainous areas of China is mostly hilly terrain with multiple obstacles, and traditional manual spraying operations are time-consuming and laborious. The use of agricultural plant protection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can reduce the problem of high manual operation costs. To solve the problem of optimizing the spraying operation path of plant protection UAVs, this study focused on the complex agricultural environment in the southwestern mountainous areas of China. First, a 2D agricultural map model with multiple obstacles was constructed using MATLAB. Second, the optimization requirements for job paths were analyzed, and a path optimization model based on the grid graph method was studied, aiming to shorten the total flight distance and reduce the number of paths. By applying the genetic algorithm, efficient optimization of the spraying path of plant protection UAV was carried out. Simulation verification showed that the optimized path significantly shortened the flight distance, accelerated convergence speed, and effectively avoided local repeated paths, thereby greatly improving the spraying efficiency of plant protection UAV.

668-677

Authors: Yong TIAN, Zhengtao WANG, Jian SONG, Fuxiang XIE, Hongwei WANG

Taking the large storage tank as the cleaning object, a cleaning robot integrating shoveling, crushing, sweeping and dust-absorbing was developed, and its dust-absorbing system was analyzed and optimized. Firstly, Fluent-EDEM gas-solid coupling was utilized to simulate the dust-absorbing system. By analyzing the fluid distribution and particle trajectory, the internal structure of the dust collection box was optimized to reduce the dust particles entering the fan box. Then, by analyzing the structural parameters of the suction nozzle, the influence of the nozzle shoulder angle, nozzle length, and shoulder height on the dust-absorbing effect was explored, and the parameters were determined, so as to reduce the energy loss and increase the flow rate on both sides of the nozzle. Finally, through the dust suction test, different models of nozzles were tested for dust suction, and the wind speed at the nozzle was measured, and the leakage of dust particles on both sides of the nozzle was significantly reduced after optimization, which verified the reliability of the simulation results and provided a theoretical basis for the design of the sweeping robot.

688-701

Authors: Yebiao XU

In order to solve the difficulties in logistics distribution in remote rural areas, a systematic planning of agricultural logistics distribution for UAV distribution is carried out. Considering the limit of cruising range, from the perspective of green routing, a multi-package distribution path planning model of UAV agricultural logistics considering the limitation of cruising range of UAV is established with the goal of minimizing total energy consumption. According to the actual number of UAVs, the task allocation is carried out, and a mixed integer nonlinear programming model of task allocation is established. The improved ant colony algorithm is used to solve the problem. The core idea is to exchange the pheromones of each ant subgroup, and then use the insertion-based heuristic method and crossover and inversion operations to optimize the path. For the case of remote areas in western China, the agricultural UAV distribution path planning considering the mileage limit is conducive to saving resources and obtaining the lowest energy consumption distribution path ; for the problem of agricultural logistics distribution path planning considering the mileage limit of UAV, the improved ant colony algorithm designed in this study has higher solution accuracy than the traditional ant colony algorithm.

721-730

Authors: Yanjun LI, Yichao NING, Fuxiang XIE, Yang BAI

Vegetable precision planting agronomy is suitable for my country's current vegetable planting system, and the air-suction vegetable precision planter is currently the most important work tool in my country. This paper designs a kind of air-absorbing vegetable precision sower for the problems of small vegetable seeds with small grains, poor mobility and high difficulty in achieving uniform sowing of small seeds. First, Fluent software is used to simulate and analyze the flow field of the air chamber in the seed metering device, and the pressure and velocity of the fluid in the air chamber are analyzed. Through the comparison of the pressure distribution cloud chart and the velocity distribution cloud chart, the influence of different apertures, holes, vacuum degree, and gas chamber depth on the flow field of the gas chamber is analyzed. The air suction seed discharger test bench was set up and orthogonal test was carried out, and the test results showed that the optimal parameter combination was 3.5 kPa vacuum degree of the air chamber, 2.4 mm diameter of the type hole, and 18 r/min rotational speed of the seed discharging disk. The high-speed photographic test was carried out under the optimal parameter combination, and the results showed that leakage of suction, adsorption of 1 seed, and adsorption of multiple seeds appeared in the process of suction, and it is important for the development of the air suction precision machine for small seeded vegetables with better performance. The results showed that the phenomenon of leakage, adsorption of 1 seed and adsorption of multiple seeds occurred in the process of seed suction, which provided a reference basis for the development of a better performance of the air-absorption precision planter for small seeds.

745-759

Authors: Lixue ZHU, Wenxuan LUO, Hongnan HU, Shiang ZHANG, Yifan SHI, Shinian HUANG

Water jet technology, as a non-contact cutting and crushing technique, is commonly used in industries such as cleaning, rust removal, cutting, drilling, and mining. It enables a green and environmentally friendly production process by avoiding environmental pollution, heat generation, blade replacement, and sharpening issues. Cutting, cleaning, and crushing techniques are widely applied in various stages of agricultural production, but mostly through contact-based methods. The application of non-contact water jet technology in the agricultural field is still in its infancy. This paper summarized the current application status and research progress of water jet technology in different operational stages of agriculture, including sowing, management, field harvesting, and post-harvest processing. The specific requirements of key parameters for different operational objects and stages were analysed. Furthermore, the challenges encountered in the application of water jet technology in agriculture and provides prospects for future research directions were discussed. The review is intended to provide references for the promotion and green sustainable development of water jet technology in the agricultural field.

771-783

Authors: Biniam ZEWDIE, Adesoji M. OLANIYAN, Amana WAKO, Dereje ALEMU, Tamrat LEMA

When designing appropriate machinery systems, equipment, and infrastructures for interacting with, cultivating, gathering, and agriculture-related processing, it is required to have an understanding of the engineering characteristics of agricultural products. This unpredictability makes it difficult to design or develop machines that can efficiently and effectively manage a wide range of product characteristics. Experimental analysis was used to accomplish the study's objective, which was to investigate the implications of variation on the physical characteristics and frictional parameters of common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) concerning the design of the threshing machine. One hundred bean seeds from each variety were randomly selected and their three primary dimensions were measured with a digital vernier caliper (least count 0.01 mm) and a micro-screw gauge in order to determine the dimensional parameters. The remaining parameters (elongation at the width, thickness, and vertical orientation, geometrical mean diameter, arithmetic mean diameter, square mean diameter, equivalent mean diameter, roundness, sphericity, flakiness ratio, aspect ratio, cross-sectional area, projected area, transverse surface area, and the seed volume) were calculated using mathematical models. Gravimetric characteristics true density and seed volumes were calculated using the toluene displacement method. The data were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA), and the Duncan multiple range test was used to separate the means. Significance was accepted at 95% confidence interval (p< 0.05).The results data are required for predicting loads in agricultural storage structures, and to establish useful sources for the development of machinery for handling, cleaning, storing, transporting and drying, among other things.

796-806

Authors: Weiqiang PI, Jingrui CHENG, Qinliang SUN, Guanyu LIU, Yong WANG, Rongyang WANG

The detection of pesticide residues in white tea fresh leaves is an important step to ensure the quality safety of white tea finished products. Traditional detection methods are costly and inefficient to realize the demand for fast, low-cost, and accurate detection of pesticide residues in white tea fresh leaves. In this study, five types of white tea fresh leaf pesticide residue sample data were obtained using hyperspectral imaging technology for the high-frequency detected pesticides Glyphosate and Bifenthrin, and the SVM and 1D-CNN models were established to detect the samples after noise reduction processing and feature band screening methods. The study shows that the 1D-CNN model has better feature extraction ability, in which the SG-CARS-1D-CNN model has the highest detection accuracy, which is 94.62%, 95.12%, 94.35%, 94.95%, and 95.27% for the five type of species samples, respectively. This study provides pesticide residue detection for white tea fresh leaves based on the combination of hyperspectral data and an artificial intelligence model, which provides an intelligent, nondestructive, efficient, and high-precision pesticide residue detection model for white tea fresh leaves.

822-833

Authors: Xiaoning HE, Shikuan MA, Zhixin LIU, Dongwei WANG, Shuqi SHANG, Guanghui LI, Hongxiu LI

In this study, saline soil parameters were calibrated based on EDEM discrete element method, soil density, soil elastic modulus, soil shear modulus, soil particle size distribution and Poisson's ratio were determined. The Hertz-Mindlin with Johnson-Kendall-Roberts（JKR） model was used to simulate the characteristics of soil stress and strain of particles under external forces. The JKR contact parameter between saline soil particles was used as a test factor, and the soil accumulation angle was used as a test index to carry out the saline soil contact parameter calibration test. It was finally determined that an elastic recovery coefficient of 0.262, a static friction coefficient of 0.263, a dynamic friction coefficient of 0.234, and a JRK surface energy of 10.084 were the optimal combinations of contact parameters for saline soils.

845-854

Authors: Xiangyu GAO, Xuejie MA, Xiangdong LIN, Qianqian SUN, Zhanfeng HOU, Xiaoming ZHANG

This study is based on the discrete element method to calibrate the physical parameters of astragalus membranaceus. Plackett Burman test, steepest climb test, and Box Behnken test were used to screen for significant influencing factors and optimal levels, and a quadratic regression model was obtained for the relative error between the simulated and physical experiment resting angles. The results showed that the relative error between the simulated and physical test angles of repose was only 0.392%, which can provide a theoretical basis for the discrete element simulation test of the working process of the astragalus membranaceus picking machine.

870-880

Authors: Zhu ZHAO, Dongli SHUI, Fengbo LIU, Bintong ZHAO, Zhongnan WANG

Aiming at issues such as low instantaneous grasping ability, unsatisfactory cutting quality, and proneness to damage of the blades for existing harvesters, by observing the physiological structure and movement characteristics of the ant's mandible and by bionic design theory, a bionic blade was designed to optimize its performance. In this paper, Camponotus was selected as the research object to observe the movement of the right mandibular teeth. It was concluded that the movement of the ant's mandibular teeth was a cutting-sawing motion. A comparative analysis was carried out using the flat blade and the mandibular teeth blade, uncovering that the mandibular teeth movement formed a sliding cut with a variable sliding cutting angle. The mandibular teeth were beneficial for clamping the target and boosting the instantaneous grasping force. The fourth tooth of the mandible was selected as the bionic prototype. from which the contour curve was extracted and analyzed, followed by the design of the bionic blade. Through the finite element method, the influence laws of parameters such as the tooth pitch, structural angle, and blade inclination angle on the stress field and deformation of the bionic blade were analyzed under two force application circumstances: along the inclination direction of the tooth edge and the blade face direction. The results showed that when the applied force was along the tooth edge inclination, the total deformation of the bionic blade initially decreased and then increased with the tooth pitch increase. The maximum equivalent stress of the bionic blade rose gradually with the tooth pitch increase, and the total deformation decreased with the increase of the inclination angle of the tooth. The equivalent stress diminished with the rise in the inclination angle. With the increase of the structural edge angle, the total deformation of the bionic blade rose gradually. When the force was applied along the blade face direction, the deformation and stress values of the blade were significantly lower than those when the force was along the tooth edge inclination. The research findings can offer theoretical references for the design of bionic blades for harvesters.

11-21

Authors: Fanxia KONG, Haozheng SUN, Jiankun LI, Baixu LIU, Lili YI, Yubin LAN, Xin HAN, Duanyang GENG, Qiang GAO

Precision soil fertilization is an important aspect of smart precision agriculture development, and the fertilization prescription map is a prerequisite for precision fertilization. Taking grapevine soil information as an example, this study explores the impact of different sampling densities on the accuracy of soil nutrient distribution. Experimental trials were conducted using sampling densities of 1m x 1m, 3m x 3m, 6m x 6m, 9m x 9m, and 12m x 12m, with the optimal sampling density determined to be 6m x 6m. Nutrient distribution maps were created using Bigemap and ArcGIS software, and based on nutrient balance calculations using ArcGIS software, fertilization prescription maps were developed. Furthermore, precise fertilization schemes for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers were formulated based on the prescription maps. This study provides methodological and data support for research on precision soil fertilization.

33-44

Authors: Hesham A. FARAG, Mohamed M. EL-KHOLY, Mahmoud OKASHA, Ahmed E. AZAB, Ahmed E. KHATER, Reham M. KAMEL

This study aims to develop and evaluate a locally manufactured carbonization unit with a screw conveyor. Various carbonization temperatures (350, 400, and 450°C) and feeding rates (50, 75, and 100 kg/h) were examined to determine optimal conditions for producing biochar from rice husk (RH). The results revealed that increasing the pyrolysis temperature from 350 to 450°C decreased RH biochar yield, while increasing the feeding rate from 50 to 100 kg/h increased it. Ash content was 22.4% at 350°C for 100 kg/h, and the maximum value was 31.4% at 450°C and 50 kg/h. The BET surface area of the biochar increased from 105.71 to 312.32 m2/g at 450°C, with slight non-significant changes at a 100 kg/h feed rate. RH biochar showed decreasing H and O values with higher temperatures and lower feed rates. RH biochar at 450°C and 50 kg/h showed increased macro porosity and surface area, rendering it suitable for agricultural application as a soil amendment.

57-66

Authors: Rosalinda L. ABAD, Frank Michael L. JACLA, Hipolito C. BUCCAT, Paul James C. GAÑOLA, Alliver P. SAPITULA

Manual peanut digging in the Philippines is still a practice due to the unavailability of low-cost mechanical diggers adaptable to local field conditions. Hence, the peanut digger design and evaluation were developed. The design involves benchmarking local field practices, ANSYS analysis of the digger blade, and CAD drawing. It is designed to dig, lift, convey, and drop the peanut stalk in a windrow. Its main parts are the main frame, digger blade, belt stalk conveyor, power transmission system, and hitching system. The draft and power requirement for a hand tractor to propel the digger is 1,387.48N and 2.0 hp, respectively. The treatments are the belt stalk conveyor speed levels at 205 rpm, 410 rpm, and 615 rpm, replicated three (3) times with three (3) plots per replication. It revealed an Actual Field Capacity, digging efficiency, and mechanical physical damage of 0.025 ha/h, 95.31%, and 0.56%, respectively. Investing in the machine is economically viable with a BCR of 2.09, a break-even point of 5.33 ha/yr, and a payback period of 1.60 years. This implies digging above the BEP accumulates profit for farmers.

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.

363-374

Authors: Fan JIN, Dejiang LIU, Chengyi ZHONG, Keheng YAO, Jian TONG, Zhibing JIANG

In view of the lack of accurate contact parameters and the difficulty of measuring contact parameters in the discrete element simulation of mechanized harvesting of highland barley, this study took the wax-ripening highland barley as the object, carried out the discrete element simulation of highland barley stem based on EDEM, and calibrated the discrete element simulation parameters of highland barley stem by response surface optimization. In this paper, Plackett-Burman test was used to screen 8 initial parameters. It was found that the static friction coefficient between highland barley stems, the rolling friction coefficient between highland barley stems, and the rolling friction coefficient between highland barley stems and steel plates have significant effects on the particle angle of repose. Based on the optimal value range of significant factors determined by the steepest ascent test, a second-order regression model of the angle of repose and significant parameters was established and optimized based on the results of Box-Behnken test. The optimal parameter combination of significant parameters was obtained as follows: static friction coefficient between highland barley stems is 0.27, rolling friction coefficient between highland barley stems is 0.07, and rolling friction coefficient between highland barley stems and steel is 0.26. Finally, the simulation results under the optimal parameter combination are compared with the actual test angle of repose. The relative error is 0.52 %. That indicates that the parameters of the simulation calibration are credible, which can provide a reference for the future research on the cleaning device in the mechanized harvesting of highland barley.

391-401

Authors: Bo ZHAO, Suchun LIU, Xiufeng ZHAO, Licheng ZHU, Tianfu ZHANG, Zhenhao HAN, Weipeng ZHANG

In agricultural operation scenarios, the diversity of farmland terrain, crops and other forms, as well as uncertain factors such as weather changes and crop growth during agricultural operation, can have an impact on the construction of high-precision maps. In order to address these challenges and analyze operational scenarios based on the characteristics of agricultural scenarios, this paper proposes a point cloud map construction algorithm for plant point removal and locatability esti-mation. Based on the existing SLAM framework, plant point removal and locatability estimation are improved. Firstly, RGB images and NIR images are fused to identify and remove plant point clouds, preserving effective inter frame matching information, reducing the impact of dynamic points on inter frame matching, and achieving high front-end motion estimation accuracy. Then, the locali-zation estimation method based on learning is used to determine the motion estimation status and determine whether to execute the backend optimization algorithm. Finally, the back end optimi-zation algorithm based on Factor graph is designed, and the Factor graph, constraint relationship and optimization function are constructed to optimize the pose of all frames. The optimized map construction algorithm reduces the re projection errors between field roads, paths, and crop rows by 10.27%, 20.76%, and 14.36% compared to before optimization. To verify the actual operational effectiveness of the point cloud map construction algorithm, the hardware part of the multi-sensor information collection system was designed, and sensor internal and external parameter calibration were also carried out. A map information collection vehicle was built and field experiments were conducted. The results showed that the positioning error of the point cloud map construction method proposed in this paper is less than 0.5 °, and the cumulative error of 30m translation is less than 12cm, which meets the actual operational requirements.

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.

466-479

Authors: Jingqiong WU, Xuke WU, Jiabo HUANG

As a bridge connecting agricultural production and consumption, the circulation of agricultural products has the function of connecting supply and demand, guiding production and promoting consumption. However, the development of rural logistics in China is slow, and most logistics centers still rely on experience to plan the pick-up vehicle routings, resulting in long transport time and high cost. In order to improve the efficiency of pick-up and reduce transportation costs, a joint optimization model of cold-chain pick-up vehicle routing and cargo allocation for fresh agricultural products was proposed in this study. Soft time window constraint and three-dimensional loading constraints were considered, and the lowest pick-up cost was used as optimization goals in this model. In addition, adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm (ALNS) and heuristic depth-first search algorithm (HDFS) were combined to solve the model. A case study of Kunming International Flower Auction Center was conducted to compare the schemes of pick-up vehicle routing before and after optimization. Results demonstrate that the pick-up cost after optimization decreases by 9.6 %, the number of vehicles decreases by one, the total volume utilization rate of vehicles increases by 23 %, and the total load utilization rate of vehicles increases by 15 %. This study provides a model reference and solution method for enterprise operators to formulate schemes of pick-up vehicle routing quickly and reasonably.

492-500

Authors: Yang LI, Yanmin TAO, Yulong CHEN, Yiteng LEI

The mechanical properties of lavender are the basis for design and study of mechanized equipment for planting and harvesting of lavender. This paper determines and studies the natural width and height of plant and spike length of three kinds of lavender widely planted in the Yili region and obtains the distribution rules of parameters of the basic physical properties of lavender. Meanwhile, the test of the mechanical properties of lavender was done at the moisture content in the harvest period and different moisture contents. The results indicated that the maximum separation force of the flower of three kinds of lavender (111.3N) was much smaller than the minimum breaking force of the stem (201.5N); and the moisture content significantly affected the mechanical properties of lavender, which could provide corresponding design parameters and important theoretical basis for the design of a new lavender harvester based on separation technology.

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.

557-568

Authors: Junming HOU, Yachen YU, Ziyuan TANG, Liang ZHANG, Jiuyu JIN, Wei WANG

The mechanized harvesting of mulberry is important for its production. In the process of harvesting, it is considered not only the mechanical damage of mulberry fruit but also its harvesting efficiency. It is very important to improve the vibration harvesting efficiency of mulberry. In this study, modal analysis of mulberry trees and harmonic response analysis of branches were carried out to determine the harvesting frequency of the branch's vibration and other parameters. The effects of excitation frequency and vibration position on the triaxial acceleration of the mulberry branch at different positions were analyzed by vibration test. Then the triaxial acceleration of branches at different positions was analyzed. The conditions of the mulberry fruit shedding were obtained through theoretical analysis. Through the 20-order modal analysis of mulberry, it is concluded that a better vibration effect can be achieved when the vibration frequency is controlled at 4-16 Hz. According to the harmonic response analysis, the best excitation frequencies are 5-6 Hz, 10-13 Hz, and 14-16 Hz. The harmonic response analysis of fruit branches was carried out, and the stress of fruit stalks at 5 Hz, 10 Hz, and 15 Hz were analyzed. The result shows that the maximum stress is 2.9252×107 Pa, the excitation position is the first-order branch, and the excitation frequency is 15 Hz. The frequencies obtained from modal analysis and harmonious response analysis were used to conduct experiments. When the excitation frequency was 15 Hz, the triaxial accelerations aX, aY, and aZ were 2.12 g, 4.16 g, and 3.99 g, respectively, which were more conducive to the shedding of mulberry fruits.

579-588

Authors: Andrii DIACHUN, Ivan GEVKO, Oleg LYASHUK, Andrii STANKO, Andrii PIK, Yuri OMELYANSKYI

A new design of an elastic brush-like screw for grain material transportation and mixing by screw conveyors with a lower degree of damage to some particles of the material has been presented in the paper under discussion. The theoretical calculation of the fiber displacement value of an elastic brush-like screw has been carried out on the basis of the deformation analysis of an idealized system with elastic elements. A differential equation of the mean line of deformation of several fibers of an elastic brush-like screw located in the same plane perpendicular to the distributed loading during grain material transportation has been derived. The solution of the differential equation was obtained by the numeric method and on its basis the curves of the middle line of deformed fibers of an elastic brush-like screw for different values of its structural parameters. The results of the experimental study of the maximum deformation value of the elastic fibers of a brush-like screw have been presented.

601-610

Authors: Zhifang BI, Yanwen LI, Jiaxiong GUAN, Xiaoying ZHANG

Real-time detection has become an essential component in intelligent agriculture and industry. In this paper, a real-time wheat spike detection method based on the lightweight deep learning network RepYOLO is proposed. Addressing the small and densely packed phenotype characteristics of wheat spikes, the channel attention mechanism module CBAM from the traditional YOLOv4 algorithm is introduced and multiple convolutional kernels are merged using a structural reparameterization method. Additionally, the ATSS algorithm is incorporated to enhance the accuracy of object detection. These approaches significantly reduce the model size, improve the inference speed, and lower the memory access cost. To validate the effectiveness of the model, it is trained and tested on a large dataset of diverse wheat spike images representing various phenotypes. The experimental results demonstrate that the RepYOLO algorithm achieves an average accuracy of 98.42% with a detection speed of 8.2 FPS. On the Jetson Nano platform, the inference speed reaches 34.20 ms. Consequently, the proposed model effectively reduces the memory access cost of deep learning networks without compromising accuracy and successfully improves the utilization of CPU/MCU limited performance.

621-630

Authors: Tibor RITTNER, Alexandru Bogdan GHEȚE, Ovidiu MARIAN, Ovidiu RANTA, Valentin CRIȘAN, Cătălin BOGDAN, Adrian MOLNAR

In vine cultivation, pests are obstacles to obtaining crops that correspond both qualitatively and quantitatively. In this work, main working qualitative indices were determined. These working qualitative indices were determined under real field conditions using 2 types of nozzles, an air injection nozzle and a standard nozzle. The working qualitative indices determined were DV1, DV5, DV9, coverage degree, number of drops and the amount of solution deposited on target surface. For both speeds of 5 and 7 km/h, DV5 values classified the spray extra and ultra coarse spectrum. The coverage rate was between 55% and 99% regardless of travel speed.

644-652

Authors: Mario CRISTEA, Nicolae-Valentin VLĂDUȚ, Georgiana MOICEANU

Considering that every day the sun generates more energy than the planet needs for daily consumption, harnessing solar energy represents one of the future solutions for clean, sustainable energy, obviously with the technological limitations related to the ability to transform this energy into electricity. The paper presents a functional model of equipment that allows the capture of solar energy using special panels, which can rotate both horizontally and vertically according to the sun, so that the incidence of rays with the radiating surface of the panels is maximum and the yields obtained at different angles of inclination in the vertical plane at 60, respectively in the horizontal plane at 0 grade

663-678

Authors: Dan CUJBESCU, Dragoș DUMITRU, Iulian VOICEA, Cătălin PERSU, Iuliana GĂGEANU, Alexandru IONESCU, Ana Maria TĂBĂRAȘU, Dragoș ANGHELACHE

Aquaculture, as a dynamic field, undergoes continuous evolution requiring continuous improvements in efficiency and new research efforts. Estimating fish biomass is an essential practice in the field of precision aquaculture, obtaining periodic information on fish biomass has been identified as an urgent need, considering the objective of optimizing daily feeding, controlling fish density and finally determining the optimal timing of harvesting. Conventional weighing methods, which often rely on manual procedures, have inherent challenges. Manual weighing processes are labor-intensive, requiring substantial time and human resources. Furthermore, manual handling of fish during weighing procedures induces considerable stress on aquatic organisms, potentially compromising their health and welfare. Consequently, there is a pressing need in the aquaculture industry to explore alternative weighing techniques that alleviate stress levels while increasing operational efficiency. In response to these challenges, contemporary research efforts have increasingly focused on the development of noninvasive and automated weighing methodologies. These innovations aim to simplify the weighing process, minimize human intervention and reduce the level of stress experienced by the fish population. However, estimating fish biomass without human intervention presents significant challenges because fish are sensitive and move freely in an environment where visibility, lighting, and stability are difficult to control. The paper analyzes technological solutions for biomass estimation according to the concept of Aquaculture 4.0.

689-698

Authors: Jinlong WU, Ronghui MIAO

Aiming at the problems of less research on cherry segmentation and identification, and slow recognition speed and low classification accuracy with agricultural products, a method based on DeepLabV3 was proposed to realize the rapid segmentation and identification of cherry in complex orchard environment. Complex environment mainly includes frontlighting, backlighting, cloudy and rainy days, single fruit, multi fruit, fruit overlap, and branch and leaf occlusion. This model proposed the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module to effectively extract multi-scale contextual information, and solved the problem of target segmentation at multiple scales. The obtained data was divided into training, validation and testing sets in a 7:1:2 ratios, and the ResNet50 was selected as backbone of the network. Experimental results show that the algorithm in this paper can segment cherry quickly and accurately, the mean intersection over union (MIoU) was 91.06%, the mean pixel accuracy (MPA) was 93.05%, and the kappa coefficient was 0.89, which was better than fully convolutional networks (FCN), SegNet, DeepLabV1 and DeepLabV2. It is demonstrated that this study can provide technical support for intelligent segmentation of agricultural products.

710-719

Authors: Min FU, Jianan CAI, Shike GUO, Lei CHEN,, Chengmeng WANG, Gangqiang YANG, Xiaoman CUI

Kiwifruit picking robots can replace manual labor for mechanized kiwifruit harvesting. However, existing picking robots encounter issues such as low separation efficiency of fruit stalks, poor stability of fruit gripping, and inaccurate identification when picking kiwifruit clusters. In response, a multi-fruit picking end-effector was designed to pick clusters of kiwifruit efficiently based on their distribution characteristics. The gripping range of the gripping device was determined based on the parameters of the spatial distribution of the fruit clusters. A multi-fruit gripping mechanics model was constructed, and the gripping force was analyzed to ensure efficient and stable fruit picking. Critical parameters of the fruit stalk separation device were determined through kinematic trajectory analysis to improve the separation efficiency of fruit stalks. Additionally, a dual-sensor fusion recognition method was proposed to identify fruit cluster locations accurately. The results of the picking experiment demonstrate that the end-effector can pick fruits in an average time of 8.28 s per cluster, with a net fruit-picking rate of 87.5% and a fruit damage rate of 7.5%. The end-effector shows a positive picking effect on kiwifruit fruits distributed in clusters. This study can serve as a reference for the development of kiwifruit-picking robots.

731-740

Authors: Xin DU, Qianhao YU, Shufa CHEN, Qixin SUN, Han ZHANG, Changqing LIU

In order to improve the uniformity and stability of seed delivery and meet the requirements of precision sowing operation, a kind of seed push wheel designed to mesh with the seed discharging disk was developed. The wheel underwent theoretical analysis and experimental optimization regarding parameters such as tooth profile, tooth count, and tooth height. Using a pneumatically inflated maize precision seed-metering device as the seeding carrier, a full-factorial experiment was conducted with operational speed and tooth height as the experimental variables, and qualification rate, reseeding rate, and leakage rate as the performance indicators. A multivariate quadratic regression model was established to assess the relationships between the factors and indicators. The results indicated that optimal seed guiding performance was achieved when the seed push wheel had 9 teeth, a tooth height of 5.2–6.2 mm, and an operational speed of 9.0–12.6 km/h. This study provides a theoretical foundation and data support for the development of precision seeding technology and corresponding seed guiding devices.

750-764

Authors: Vasu KEERATIVUTISEST, Wornchanok CHAIYASOONTHORN, Bilal KHALID, Beata ŚLUSARCZYK, Singha CHAVEESUK

This research investigated the factors determining the adoption of AI-based applications in Thailand and Poland's agricultural sectors. The study explored the sector's adoption of AI technology and its contributions to driving the market and business performance. Despite the potential of AI in the agricultural sector, its adoption rate still needs to be clarified, and its potential needs to be better understood, hence the need for the study. The research applied primary data collected from respondents working in the agricultural sector in Thailand and Poland using a structured questionnaire. A sample of 356 and 377 Why respondents were representative samples in Thailand and Poland, respectively. The research was driven by the hypotheses evaluated using the Structural Equation Model (SEM). The findings indicated that organizational size was the most influential determinant of AI-based applications in both countries. Another significant determinant was technological competence in both countries. Additionally, social influence was a significant determinant in Thailand, while facilitating conditions and effort expectancy were significant determinants in Poland. The multi-group analysis revealed that the two countries were not invariant; hence, the effect of independent variables on behavioral intention to adopt AI between the two countries was different. The research recommended that each country's policymakers consider its contexts differently in AI-based application adoption policies. However, improving the organizational size and technological competence would enhance the adoption of AI-based applications across the board.

775-787

Authors: Huyang TANG, Gang WANG, Bo ZHOU, Yu WAN, Fuming KUANG, Wei XIONG, Dequan ZHU, Shun ZHANG

The core equipment of rice dry direct-seeding with film mulching devices shows poor adaptability to rice varieties, struggling to accommodate diverse seeding quantity for both hybrid and conventional rice varieties. A seed-filling component with unilateral and bilateral seed-filling function was designed to solve this challenge. Through theoretical analysis the key structural parameters of the seed-filling component were determined. Then Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations were conducted to analyze the seeding performance, leading to the identification of optimal parameters for orifice width and orifice deflection angle of the seed-filling component, which are 7.7 to 8.5 mm and 1.71 to 2.41 degrees, respectively. Bench experiments using the central composite design indicates that the optimal parameters for the seed-filling component's orifice width and orifice deflection angle are 8.1 mm and 1.99 degrees, respectively. In the optimal combination of orifice parameters, for unilateral seed-filling in hybrid rice, the miss-seeding rate is 4%, the qualified rate is 84.8%, and the reseeding rate is 11.2%. For bilateral seed-filling in conventional rice, the miss-seeding rate is 4.2%, the qualified rate is 85.2%, and the reseeding rate is 10.6%. The result of field hole-seeding with film mulching is consistent with the result of indoor bench experiments, demonstrating that the seed-filling component of the hole seeder can meet the seeding requirements for rice precision direct-seeding with film mulching. This paper provides theoretical reference for the design and optimization of the seed-filling component for rice hole-seeding equipment.

798-808

Authors: Zixuan ZHANG, Honglei JIANG, Xiaoning HE, Fangyan ZHANG, Jiasheng WANG, Dongwei WANG

In response to the challenges of difficult separation and incomplete cleaning during the mechanized harvesting of Cyperus esculentus L., a combined threshing and cleaning device consisting of a fruit-picking roller, a cleaning belt, and an air-screening system was designed. The structure and working principle of this device were explained, and the main components and operating parameters were determined through theoretical analysis. Using fruit-picking roller speed, cleaning belt angle, and fan speed as evaluation indicators, a three-factor three-level field experiment was conducted based on the Box-Behnken central composite design principle. Regression models between loss rate, impurity rate, and significant factors were established, and the optimal working parameters were determined using regression equations. The results showed that when the fruit-picking roller speed was 543.7 r/min, the cleaning belt angle was 50.3°, and the fan speed was 532.4 r/min, the loss rate of sesame seed harvesting was 2.67%, and the impurity rate was 2.49%. The results of field validation experiments indicated that the average loss rate of the combined threshing and cleaning device under the optimal parameter combination was 2.88%, and the average impurity rate was 2.41%, which were consistent with the optimization results of the regression model and fully met the requirements of mechanized sesame seed harvesting production.

820-829

Authors: Zhibo LI, Tong YE, Meiling NIE, Haitao LAN, Xin ZHANG, Wei ZHAO

Aiming at the problem of high cob loss in non-opposed row harvesting of 4YZ-6 fresh corn harvester, a front-end part adapted to the grain splitter of this model was designed. The structure of the front-end part was elaborated, the sliding conditions of the stalks under the action of the grain splitter were studied, the forces between the stalks and the front-end part were theoretically analyzed, and the operating effect of the front-end part was verified through field tests. The tests show that the expected operating effect is optimal when the inclination of the grain separator is 27.7°, the clamping angle of the grain splitter is 31°, the stubble height is 270 mm, and the front-end guards half width is 3.8 mm. The verification test for this parameter combination yielded a breakage rate of 8.71% and a loss rate of 9.47%, which were basically consistent with the expected values. The design of this front-end component of the grain splitter provides an effective means to reduce the loss of ears in the harvesting process of fresh corn.

848-860

Authors: Dragoș DUMITRU, Carmen BĂLȚATU, Eugen MARIN, Gabriel-Valentin GHEORGHE, Dragoș MANEA, Marinela MATEESCU, Melania-Elena CISMARU

The management of inter-row space of vineyards and fruit trees has emerged as an essential approach in sustainable agriculture, optimizing resource use and improving ecosystem services. This paper reviews a range of innovative technologies and solutions aimed at revolutionizing line management practices. Modern sensing and monitoring systems provide real-time data on soil moisture, nutrient levels, and plant health, facilitating precision row-to-row management. Furthermore, techniques for grassing the space between rows of vines and fruit trees are important for space management, ensuring good air circulation and facilitating agricultural activities such as maintenance and harvesting. In addition, the advent of inter-row seeding machines simplified the implementation of cover crops. These machines use advanced seed delivery mechanisms, precisely distributing the cover seed into the spaces between the rows. This not only encourages soil health and erosion prevention but also mitigates weed competition, increasing the overall resilience of the agroecosystem. The purpose of this review is to discuss the combination of state-of-the-art technologies such as 3D LIDAR technology, intelligent systems used for inter-row management of vines and fruit trees, and inter-row solar panel systems, all these examples have revolutionized inter-row management in vineyards and orchards. This holistic approach optimizes resource allocation, improves soil health, and encourages sustainable agricultural practices, paving the way for greener and more resilient inter-row spaces in modern agroecosystems.

11-24

Authors: Valerian CEREMPEI, Victor ȚÎȚEI, Nicolae-Valentin VLĂDUT, Oana-Diana CRISTEA

The article presents the results of the studies on the particularities of the seeds and the quality indices of the green mass, obtained from the non-traditional crops Amaranthus hypochondriacus, Raphanus sativus var. olifera, Sinapsis alba, Linum usitatissimum, Sesamum indicum and the hybrid Rumex tianschanicus × Rumex patientia. The results reflect the values of dimensional parameters, friability, seed structure and quality indices of the harvested green mass (nutritive value, biochemical potential to obtain biomethane). It has been demonstrated that the criterion of dimensional proportionality Kdp, proposed in this paper effectively reflects the structure of the seeds. The harvested green mass from non-traditional crops has the optimal content of protein and carbohydrates for animal feed and biomethane production.

44-52

Authors: Yanwen LI, Juxia LI, Lei DUAN, Tengxiao NA, Pengpeng ZHANG, Qingyu ZHI

Due to the complex environment of pig farms and the diversity of pig behaviors, the existing methods based on deep learning cannot meet the requirements of high accuracy and real-time detection of pig eating behavior. In this paper, a SE-YOLOX model for detecting pig diet and drinking behaviors was designed. In this model, a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention module is introduced between the neck layer and the prediction layer of YOLOX, and the input feature map is compressed into a vector through global average pooling operation, and then mapped to a smaller vector through a fully connected layer. A sigmoid function is also used to compress each element in this vector to between 0 and 1 and multiply it with the original input feature map to get the weighted feature map. Through SE attention mechanism, the model can learn the importance of each channel adaptively, thus improving the detection accuracy. The experimental results show that the mean Average Prediction (mAP) of the SE-YOLOX model is 88.03%, which is higher than 13.11% of the original YOLOX model. SE-YOLOX can ensure real-time performance, it also can effectively improve the accuracy of pig diet and drinking water behavior detection.

70-82

Authors: Liming ZHOU, Yifan ZENG, Kang NIU, Yanwei YUAN, Shenghe BAI, Kaikang CHEN

For Chinese cabbage cutting device in the harvesting process, the problem of cutting resistance and low cutting root qualification rate will occur. This paper takes the Chinese cabbage root as the research object, analyses the root-cutting mechanism of Chinese cabbage, and determines that the main factors affecting its cutting effect are the cutter's inclination angle, rotational speed and its working speed. The finite element method is adopted to establish a rigid-flexible coupling model between the cutting device and the cabbage root, and the Response Surface Method (RSM) central composite design method is used to investigate the relationship among the cutter inclination angle, the cutter rotational speed as well as the working speed and Maximum root-cutting reaction force (MRF) of the cabbage and to further obtain the optimal combination of parameters. Field test results show that in the optimal combination of parameters, which means cutter inclination angle of 11o, cutter rotating speed of 216 r/min and working speed of 0.28 m/s, the root cutting effect is perfect. At this time, the root-cutting qualification rate of 92.81% and field productivity of 0.12 hm2/h, meet the requirements of the standard of Chinese cabbage harvesting mechanization. The results of the study can provide reference for optimization of Chinese cabbage harvesting equipment design.

93-102

Authors: Yuliang WANG, Zhiqiao WANG, Zhaoying CHEN, Guoqiang FAN, Rui SU, Peijun YIN, Jinxing WANG

In response to the problems of low efficiency and difficulty of pruning operations in modern dwarf dense orchards, an adjustable position saw blade pruning machine was designed, mainly consisting of a pruning device, a regulating device and a hydraulic system. Through the mechanical and modal analysis of the circular saw blade, the limit speed of the circular saw blade was derived. A finite element model of the sawing process was established, and a single-factor simulation analysis was conducted for three important parameters: feed rate, circular saw blade speed and branch diameter, and a three-factor, three-level quadratic regression orthogonal test was designed to derive the best matching sawing parameters, which was verified in field tests. The test results showed that the average passing rate was 92.8% at the feed rate of 4 km/h under the circular saw blade speed of 2800 rpm, which was higher than 88.8% at 3 km/h and 88.9% at 5 km/h. The optimum sawing parameters were: the circular saw blade speed of 2800 rpm and feed rate of 4 km/h, which were consistent with the simulation results, and the passing rate of the cut was high at this time, meeting the technical requirements of orchard pruning.

115-123

Authors: Setyo PERTIWI, Alexander Salvatoris Febrian HUTOMO, Slamet WIDODO

This research aims to explore the potential use of fluorescence spectroscopy combined with chemometrics for predicting the maturity level of crystal guava fruits non-destructively. The physicochemical properties including total soluble solids (TSS), water content, firmness, and pH were obtained from laboratory tests and used as a reference in developing the predictive model. The fluorescence emission spectra under excitation of 365 nm UV LED were used as predictors. The fluorescence spectra were acquired and recorded using a miniaturized UV-Vis spectrophotometer with an effective 340 – 800 nm range. In total, 240 sets of data from crystal guava fruit samples with varying ages of 90-106 DAA (days after anthesis) were used for calibration and validation. A multivariate analysis using Partial Least Squared Regression (PLSR) was used to develop the predictive models. Several data preprocessing methods were applied to enhance the information contained in the spectral data to find the best predictive model. Analysis results showed that the developed model could accurately predict water content with rcal=0.94; SEC=0.08%, rval=0.84; SEP=0.08%; RPD=2.59, followed by TSS with rcal =0.91; SEC = 0.47%Brix, rval =0.79; SEP=0.48%Brix; RPD=2.13. Although with lower accuracy, it also could predict firmness with rcal =0.86; SEC=0.43 kgf, rval =0.74; SEP=0.43 kgf; RPD=1.82 and pH with rcal =0.81; SEC=0.10, rval =0.79; SEP=0.09; RPD=1.76. The results indicate that fluorescence spectroscopy could be used as an alternative method for non-destructive estimation of physicochemical properties as indicators of the maturity level of crystal guava fruits.

136-146

Authors: Zhaoqin LV, Zhuangzhuang GUO, Wanzhi ZHANG, Xiang ZENG, Yuelin HAN

An automatic potato seedling film-breaking device based on machine vision was designed to reduce the labor intensity of potato film-breaking. The device mainly consists of a motion mechanism, a seedling recognition mechanism, a film-breaking mechanism, etc. Based on single-ridge and single-row potato planting agronomy, the whole structure and key component dimensions of the film-breaking device are determined, the YOLOv5s model is improved to build a potato seedling recognition system, and the film-breaking mechanism based on the parallel CoreXY structure is designed. Potato seedlings at the emerging stage are used as research objects for field film-breaking tests. The results show that the recognition rate of potato seedlings is 89.7%, the qualified rate of film-breaking is 83.5%, and the damage rate is 2.3%. This paper can provide technical support for the development of intelligent film-breaking equipment for potato seedlings.

164-172

Authors: Yaoyu LI, Tengteng QU, Qixin ZHAO, Yuzhi WANG, Zizheng DENG, Wuping ZHANG, Xiaoying ZHANG, Lili SUN, Fuzhong LI

Quantitative investigation of the utilization characteristics of precipitation resources and the production capacity of the intercropping production system under the soybean maize intercropping mode in northern China is of great significance for improving the resource utilization rate of dryland agriculture and regional sustainable development. This study adopted a completely randomized block design, and six planting modes were set up: soybean monoculture, maize monoculture, and four soybean maize intercropping modes. Plant height and grain yield data were observed, and precipitation resource utilization efficiency was calculated. Based on the FAO-56 recommended crop coefficients, the crop coefficients were corrected according to the actual growth of crops in the experimental area; combined with meteorological data, the crop water demand under different planting modes was estimated based on the Penman-Monteith principle. The results showed that crops' daily growth water demand under different planting modes was generally deficient in water in the early and middle stages of growth, and surplus in the later stages. Compared with the monoculture mode, there were significant differences in precipitation resource utilization efficiency under different intercropping modes (P < 0.05), with soybeans reduced by 67.50% ~ 89.56%, and corn reduced by 43.99% ~ 61.05%. Based on the semi-humid and semi-arid area of the eastern Loess Plateau, an appropriate irrigation system needs to be designated for soybean and corn intercropping systems in the early and middle stages of crop growth. Under a certain proportion of water resource supply, different modes have different water resource utilization efficiency and final production capacity for the intercropping system.

185-193

Authors: Zengqiang SONG, Jinliang GONG, Yanfei ZHANG

In order to study the spraying effect of hydrodynamic ultrasonic atomizing nozzle under different spraying methods, and to investigate the practical application effect of hydrodynamic ultrasonic atomizing nozzle in agriculture, the atomization angle test and droplet size test under different spraying conditions were designed. Different spraying conditions atomization angle test and droplet size test were designed, the test results data were recorded, the pattern of change of the data was observed, and the data were fit to give the data changes in line with the functional equation; different spraying conditions and different corn leaf position droplet deposition coverage test were designed and the value of the deposition coverage of each position was recorded. The results showed that: the maximum value of the variation of atomization angle under different spraying conditions was 75.49°, and the minimum value was 14.49°; the maximum value of the variation of droplet size was 18.23 μm, and the minimum value was 4.78 μm; and the droplet deposition coverage was the highest in the mid-leaf position of the upper and lower leaves of the maize when the input air pressure was 0.3 MPa, which was 86.98% and 46.97%, respectively. Fitting the atomization angle data and droplet size data, the R2 of the binomial fit was 0.85 and 0.94, respectively, and the Adjusted R2 was 0.87 and 0.88, respectively, which made the fitting function meaningful and the fitting accuracy high. The hydrodynamic ultrasonic atomizing nozzle has a great advantage in generating small droplet sizes and performs well in deposition effect, and the experimental results can provide a reference for the research of hydrodynamic nozzles in the application technology.

205-214

Authors: Dana-Claudia FARCAȘ-FLAMAROPOL, Elena SURDU, Radu I. IATAN, Petru CÂRDEI, Ramona MARE

The article presents the results of preliminary experiments necessary for the foundation of an experimental method that ensures the design and manufacturing technology for a category of composite materials with a mud matrix and agricultural waste insertion. The resources and physico-chemical properties of the mud matrix as well as the resources and physical properties of potential agricultural waste constituents of the insertion in the composite material are presented. The technological variant for the manufacture of the finished product is also presented, consisting of a compression system of the composite mixture in a paste state until solidification with moisture removal (dehydration). From a large number of parameters characterizing the experimental system, few have been varied (insertion concentration in the material, height of the raw material column in the press, raw material density, pressing force), while the quality parameters of the process have only been considered for the capacity of dehydration and material densification. The statistical analysis of the results shows that for the capacity of dehydration and densification, the main input parameters that influence are the initial moisture and initial volume of raw material. Results are obtained that allow the development of a mathematical model for the technological process of manufacturing the composite material. The purpose of the research described in this article is to determine the feasibility and feasibility conditions of the material in its possible variations. This means identifying the insertion concentration and moisture intervals of the material before extrusion, possible. The upper and lower limits of these parameters are sought, so that the material exiting the die does not immediately, or over time, disintegrate, and at the same time, the extrusion process is possible with a reasonable energy consumption.

225-236

Authors: Xiaoxiang ZHANG, Yingmei WANG, Renjie CHANG, Luxi ZHAO, Xin LI, Yinxing YAN, Wendong NIU, Shixing MA, Haiyan SONG

Traditional yield monitoring in breeding plots is manually conducted, which is labour-intensive and inefficient. To address this issue, an airborne yield monitoring system that collects yield information during the harvesting in plots was designed. The system consists of a host computer and a slave computer. The slave computer used weight and moisture sensors to collect yield information of crops. The host computer used LabVIEW software to design a data management platform that displays and saves yield information and draws yield distribution maps for data visualization. The host and slave computers communicate data through 4G networks. By designing anti-interference measures, the dynamic experimental results showed that the average errors between the measured weight and moisture content by the system were 1.330% and 2.800%, which met the accuracy requirements of yield testing in plot breeding. The results indicated that the structure of the system is reasonable and can provide reliable yield monitoring tools for researchers in breeding plots.

248-258

Authors: Shaochuan LI, Peisong DIAO, Yongli ZHAO, Hequan MIAO, Xianghao LI, Hongda ZHAO

For the problem of lacking reliable values of soil parameters required for dynamic simulation analysis of soil under high-speed tillage, no-tillage soil was taken as the research object and its parameters were calibrated using the discrete element method in this study. The Edinburgh Elasto-Plastic Adhesion (EEPA) model was determined as the soil contact model by obtaining the loading force-deformation relationship through uniaxial sealing compression tests. The regression equation was established using Plackett-Burman test and quadratic orthogonal rotation test, and the interaction effects were analyzed. The measured values of the pile angle and strain were obtained through the pile angle test and the uniaxial seal compression test, and the optimal solution was carried out. Further, the simulated values and the measured values under the optimal parameters were compared and verified, the result showed that the error values were all less than 1%. Finally, the soil model was used for high-speed tillage simulation analysis, and the obtained soil particle displacement and groove width were compared with the measured values. It was found that the ditch width error value was 3.04% and the soil displacement was basically the same. This study proved that the contact model parameters were relatively reliable, which could provide theoretical reference for the dynamic characteristics of soil during high-speed cultivation of no-tillage soil.

271-281

Authors: Yunting HUI, Yangyang LIAO, Decheng WANG, Xinxing LI, Zhiheng LU, Yong YOU, Hanchu JIA

Picking sweet peppers by hand is often time-consuming and laborious. To overcome this, in the current study, we developed an end effector for mechanized and non-destructive harvesting of sweet pepper. The design includes grip modules, shear modules and control systems. Based on the establishment of an approximate mathematical model of sweet pepper fruit and the analysis of the biomechanical characteristics of sweet pepper fruit, a pinch finger was proposed. The proposed mechanism is able to successfully achieve non-destructive and stable fixation of sweet pepper and fruit bunches. Key parameters of peduncles cutting were obtained by the cutting test. A cutting mechanism was then designed to achieve efficient separation of the fruit and fruit stem. The designed end effector achieves precise control through a single-chip microcomputer and multi-sensor integrated control system to achieve mature target fruits. The test results showed that the picking success rate, damage rate and picking time of peppers were 93.3%, 1.6% and 5 seconds, respectively. The end effector designed for sweet pepper picking has a simple and reliable structure, which provides a reference for further research on sweet pepper picking robots.

290-300

Authors: Mihail ANDREI, Gabriel POPA, Emil TUDOR, Paula ANGHELIȚA, Mihai-Gabriel MATACHE

The individual drive of the axles of a vehicle produces a reduction of the axle adhesion, implicitly reducing the total traction force of the vehicle. The paper proposes eliminating load transfer effects by using an algorithm to redistribute the traction effort between the tractive axles equipped with electric traction motors. A case study is presented, using the balancing of the electric traction torque for an electric locomotive, using the load transfer effects compensation. The conclusions can be extended to maximise the traction of all types of vehicles, such as trailers, hybrid tractors, large harvesters, and Diesel-electric locomotives.

319-326

Authors: Bambang Dwi ARGO, Adam SYECH, Avial Yosua RIJADI, Mochamad Bagus HERMANTO, Wahyunanto Agung NUGROHO

Bioactive compounds in animal and plant cells have many benefits for human health, such as antioxidants, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer. Extraction and separation of bioactive compounds from other compounds is an important step, and commonly, conventional methods are used, but these methods have disadvantages, like producing unwanted compounds. Alternative methods can be conducted using supercritical fluid extraction, but this equipment is expensive and has a small capacity. So, this study aims to produce functional and structural designs and manufacture supercritical fluid extraction machines using carbon dioxide solvents (CO2) operating with a semi-continuous system. This research succeeded in designing and manufacturing a supercritical fluid extraction machine using carbon dioxide (CO2) solvent that operates in a semi-continuous system for the extraction of bioactive compounds, with main components including cover frames, supercritical extractor chamber, low and high-pressure CO2 tubes, compressors and boosters, pipelines, direct valves, manometers, heating, cooler, and expanders, result from reservoirs and automatic control. Moreover, the preliminary simulation test studies revealed that the supercritical extractor chamber could withstand an absolute pressure of 1000 bar, a temperature of 300°C, and a work capacity of 1 L. It indicated that the supercritical CO2 fluid extractor system was performing well for the conditioning of the extractor chamber, which is generated using a booster and controlled by a one-way valve. Then, the extract is transferred to the separation chamber to separate the CO2 gas. Then, CO2 gas is returned to the low-pressure CO2 tubes for recycling and reuse for the following process.

335-344

Authors: Ioan Mihail SAVANIU, Alexandru-Polifron CHIRIȚĂ, Ioana Aristia POPOVICI, Oana TONCIU, Magdalena CULCEA, Ancuța NEAGU, Robert BLEJAN, Vasilica ȘTEFAN

The research optimizes electric consumption in agricultural excavator booms by integrating electromechanical actuators and Power-by-Wire technologies. Utilizing a PID controller reduces electric motor peak current consumption, enhancing battery longevity. The research, carried out on a reduced-scale experimental stand, reveals the potential applications of the excavator arm equipment in agriculture, such as the precise location of irrigation systems, arrangement of terraces for orchards or vineyards, setting up greenhouses, and efficient unloading/loading of bulk materials. These applications signify the versatility and adaptability of electrically powered excavators in addressing diverse agricultural needs, emphasizing the significance of the developed mechatronic system for enhancing efficiency and sustainability in agricultural practices.

356-366

Authors: Min FU, Shike GUO, Jianan CAI, Jiacheng ZHOU, Xiaoyi LIU

Currently kiwifruit picking process mainly leverages manual labour, which has low productivity and high human effort, meanwhile the existing kiwifruit picking machinery also has low picking efficiency and easily damages fruits. In this regard, a multi-fruit envelope-cutting kiwifruit picking end-effector was designed by applying TRIZ assistance in this paper. First, a common kiwifruit picking end-effector was selected as a prototype, the functional analysis method of TRIZ was applied to discover the functional defects of the prototype, after which TRIZ solution tools such as technical contradiction analysis, substance-field analysis, and trimming were applied to improve and innovate, a kiwifruit picking end-effector for automatically recognizing fruits-enveloping fruit clusters-cutting and separating fruit stalks was designed to pick kiwifruit in clusters. Then, ADAMS was applied to perform gait simulation of the end-effector picking action to verify the smoothness and coherence of the picking process. Finally, a kiwifruit picking test stand was set up to conduct picking tests in the form of fruit clusters. The results showed that the average time to pick each cluster of fruit was 8.8s, the picking success rate was 89.3%, and the picking damage rate was 6.0%. All the indicators were better than the prototype and met the expected design requirements.

379-390

Authors: Jie WANG, Lili SHANG, Liangyuan XU, Qiansheng TANG

In this study, a tire-soil rolling contact model based on the finite element method was established to determine the traction characteristics of the tire on the loose soil. Considering the soil parameters and tire parameters (loads, slip, inflation pressure and tread pattern), the influence of traction characteristics of the tire was obtained, taking tire sinkage and gross traction as evaluation indexes. The correctness of the tire-soil rolling contact model was verified by carrying out the soil bin-single wheel experiments. The results of the simulation and test showed that with the increase of load and sinkage of the tire, the gross traction tended to increase, thus enhancing the tire traction characteristics. With the increase of slip, the tire sinkage and gross traction increased, and the best tire traction characteristics were exhibited at a slip of 20%. Within the rated inflation pressure, as the inflation pressure increased, the tire sinkage decreased, the tire gross traction decreased and the traction characteristics of the tire were weakened. Under simulated working conditions, the traction characteristics of the tire first increased and then decreased with the increase of the number of tire lug pairs, and 15 tire lug pairs performed best. This paper presents a further study on the interaction between tires and soil under different influencing factors, and its findings provide an effective reference for predicting the traction performance assessment of tractor tires on working roads.

406-418

Authors: Wenxue DONG, Na LI, Fei LIU, Xuan ZHAO, Lihe WANG, Dezheng XUAN, Wendong ZHONG, Hengtong HU, Xiang KONG, Xinyu MENG, Mingyi LI, Zhijiang DUAN

In order to explore the effect of vibration on the adsorption characteristics of small particle size seeds, based on the discrete element method, the changes in the variance of the average tangential force of seeds under different amplitudes were analyzed. The variance of the average tangential force of the seeds increases exponentially with the amplitude. It is inferred that the vibration will change the intensity of the population disturbance. This reduces the seed transient tangential force i.e. transient seed internal friction. To improve the adsorption characteristics of small-sized seeds, the adsorption characteristics at different amplitudes were verified with bench tests. Increasing the amplitude can improve the adsorption characteristics of small-sized seeds. To determine the optimal operating parameters, based on the Box–Behnken test principle, response surface tests were carried out using rotational speed, negative pressure, and amplitude as test factors and seed suction compliance and leakage rate as evaluation indexes. The optimum operating parameters were determined as: rotational speed of 12.05 r/min, negative pressure of 0.89 kPa, and amplitude of 5.75 mm. At this time, the seed suction pass rate was 95.1% and the leakage rate was 2.1%. which is in line with the standard requirements.

429-440

Authors: Jia YAO, Guohai ZHANG, Xin WANG, Jitan LIAN, Minghao LIU, Xipeng QIAN, Yihu WANG, Peng LIU

Aiming at the problem of high loss of oilseed rape combine harvesting cutting platform, this paper combines the biological characteristics of oilseed rape, analyses the way and reason of oilseed rape loss, selects the harvester's forward speed, transverse cutter cutting height and longitudinal cutter cutting speed three factors to influence the loss rate of the cutting platform to carry out the study on the significance of the order of significance of the following: cutting speed > forward speed > cutting height. Through the response surface analysis method, the interaction between the factors was obtained. Through the regression model of the factors affecting the loss rate, the parameter optimisation was carried out with the objective of the lowest loss rate, and the optimal parameter combinations being obtained as follows: the forward speed was 5 km/h, the cutting speed was 1.5 m/s, and the cutting height was 50 cm. Finally, the results of the model were obtained to be reliable through the experimental validation.

451-458

Authors: Cristian Marian SORICĂ, Nicolae-Valentin VLĂDUȚ, Andreea Iulia GRIGORE, Mario CRISTEA, Elena SORICĂ, Remus Marius OPRESCU, Alexandru IONESCU, Laurențiu Constantin VLĂDUȚOIU, Lucian DUMITRESCU

For the preservation of horticultural products, the best results in keeping the attributes and quality at a level as close as possible to that of the fresh product are obtained when artificial cold (refrigeration, freezing) is used, unlike other methods. Among the existing freezing methods, freezing with cryogenic agents allows obtaining average linear freezing rates superior to the other methods. The fastest procedure for cooling food products involves the use of liquid nitrogen, which comes into direct contact with the surface of the food product that needs to be frozen. The paper analyzes the quick freezing process of three species of berries, namely blueberries, strawberries and raspberries, using an experimental model of multifunctional quick-freezing equipment - ICR, developed by INMA Bucharest as part of a national research programme. Total times and average linear freezing rates, as well as liquid nitrogen consumptions for each of the three species subjected to freezing, were tracked. Following the analysis of the experimental data, there were found the following: the minimum total freezing time, 498 s, was recorded for blueberries and the maximum total freezing time, 773 s, was recorded for strawberries; for blueberries and strawberries the average linear freezing rates recorded values of 6.32 cm/h and 6.29 cm/h corresponding to a very fast freezing process and for raspberries the average linear freezing rate recorded a value of 1.62 cm/h corresponding to a fast freezing process; liquid nitrogen consumption recorded a minimum value of 6.90 kg for blueberries and a maximum value of 7.20 kg for raspberries. In the case of blueberries, at the end of the freezing process, cracks and fissures of the epidermis and pulp were observed as a result of the thermal shock induced during the very rapid freezing process.

470-482

Authors: Chen LI

Aiming at the suboptimal local path, slow convergence speed, and many inflection points in the path planning of fruit and vegetable picking robots in complex environments, a global planning method combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and A* algorithm was proposed. Firstly, Manhattan distance was taken as a heuristic function of global programming based on the A* algorithm. Secondly, the step size of PSO was adjusted to optimize the path, shorten the path length, and reduce the number of inflection points. Finally, the planned path of the fruit and vegetable picking robot was smoothed so that it could steadily move along a smoother driving path in real scenarios. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional PSO algorithm, the hybrid algorithm based on the improved A* algorithm and PSO algorithm achieves a smoother path and fewer folding points. In comparison with the PSO algorithm, moreover, this algorithm can guarantee the path generation efficiency and the global optimum. In the end, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by shortening the path length and reducing the accumulative number of inflection points.

499-510

Authors: Na MA, Yanwen LI, Miao XU, Hongwen YAN

Stripe rust, leaf rust, and powdery mildew are important leaf diseases in wheat, which significantly affect the yield and quality of wheat. Their timely identification and diagnosis are of great significance for disease management. To achieve convenient identification of wheat leaf diseases based on mobile devices, an improved YOLOv8 method for wheat leaf disease detection is proposed. This method incorporates the CBAM(Convolutional Block Attention Module) attention mechanism module into the feature fusion network to enhance the network's feature expression ability. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8 model has an accuracy, recall rate, and mean average precision (mAP) of 95%, 98.3%, and 98.8% respectively for wheat leaf disease detection, with a model memory usage of 5.92MB. Compared with the Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 models, the mAP has been improved by 66.76, 48, 13.2, and 1.9 percentage points respectively, and it also has the lowest model memory usage. The research demonstrates that the improved YOLOv8 model can provide an effective exploration for automated detection of wheat leaf diseases.

522-534

Authors: HaiBo LIN, Chenhe XU, Yuandong LU

In response to the automatic extraction of navigation lines for wheat root cutting, this paper conducted field experiments and analyses on the navigation line extraction algorithm, based on the improved YOLOv5 algorithm. Firstly, based on the characteristics of wheat seedling rows during the wheat rejuvenation period, the YOLOv5 algorithm was improved by using rotation detection box labels, and navigation lines were extracted by fitting the detection boxes using clustering methods. Then, an experimental system was established to conduct field experiments on the algorithm: (1) Tests were conducted at three speeds of 0.5 m/s, 1.0 m/s and 1.5 m/s respectively, and the position error of the root cutter was measured and analyzed, indicating that the actual navigation path position error increased with the speed. The best navigation performance was observed at 1 m/s, with an average positional error of 18.56 mm, meeting the requirements for wheat root cutting. (2) Robustness analysis of the algorithm was conducted using data collected from 2019 to 2022. Comparative tests were conducted from four aspects: different years, different time periods, different environments, and different yaw angles. The results showed that the algorithm proposed in this paper has stronger robustness and higher accuracy.

548-557

Authors: Hexia CHU

Aiming at the problems of low efficiency and slow function convergence of the ant colony algorithm in path planning of agricultural transport robots, a fusion algorithm combined with the artificial potential field method was proposed. Firstly, the function of each parameter was analyzed according to the mathematical model of the traditional ant colony algorithm, followed by the simulation analysis of the optimal parameters through grid map modeling in MATLAB and data recording. Secondly, the deficiency of the classical artificial potential field method in agriculture, i.e., it could not arrive at the endpoint or realize local locking, was improved by introducing the intermediate point and the relative distance of the target. Finally, the features of the two algorithms were combined and the improved artificial potential field method was integrated with the traditional ant colony algorithm so that the improved artificial potential field method could play a dominant role in the initial path planning stage of agricultural transport robots while the ant colony algorithm exerted the main effect in the later stage with the increase in the pheromone concentration. It was verified through simulation analysis, it was verified that the fusion algorithm of ant colony algorithm and improved artificial potential field method outperforms traditional ant colony algorithm in terms of farthest path, optimal path, running time, and iteration number.

566-572

Authors: Yinping ZHANG, Zehua HAO, Lihang JIAO, Qinghua LUAN, Hua ZHOU, Meizhou CHEN

High breakage rate is the bottleneck that restricts corn grain mechanical harvesting in double-cropping area in China. The moisture content and compression resistance characteristics of corn grain have important effects on the breakage rate at threshing. In this paper, 5 corn varieties planted in double cropping area were selected and the effects of grain moisture content and compression resistance characteristics on threshed breakage rate were studied. Results showed that both the grains moisture content and the compression resistance characteristics had effects on the threshed breakage rate. The lower the moisture content, the greater the force required for breakage, and the more difficult it was to break. Meanwhile the breakage rate was also related to the displacement during pressing. The smaller the displacement, the lower the breakage rate, but if the displacement was too small, the corn was a silty variety and the breakage rate was still high. When the moisture content was 33%±1%, the threshing verification test showed that the average breakage rate of DH605, LY296 and KN21 was 5.39%, 5.02% and 7.13%, respectively, which was not suitable for grain mechanical harvesting under high moisture content (moisture content higher than 30%). However, the average breakage rate of LK868 and LD6018 was 4.76% and 4.25% respectively, which was suitable for grain mechanical harvesting under high moisture content. This research could provide a reference for corn varieties selection suitable for mechanical kernel harvesting in double cropping area.

583-598

Authors: Yifan WANG, Nan AN, Jiaxin LU, Zhihong ZHAO, Xiahui FU, Qingliang CUI, Juxia WANG

To enhance the vibration-damping performance of orchard transport trailers and reduce the damage rate during fruit transportation, this study constructed a D-level simulation pavement analyzed trailer's vibration-damping system, and optimized design of two types of three-stage vibration-damping transport trailers. The vibration mechanical properties of Fuji apples were experimentally evaluated, revealing a positive correlation between damage rate and vibratior acceleration. By utilizing vibration acceleration as a vibration-damping parameter, Adams software was employed to simulate the trailer's vibration-damping performance. The results demonstrate that the three-stage trailer with rubber vibration-damping pads in the horizontal direction exhibits superior vibration-damping effectiveness compared to existing trailers.

611-624

Authors: Li LI, Xuesong YANG

Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy, and agricultural materials are the basis of agricultural development. As the three rural issues (agriculture, countryside, and farmers) become increasingly important, the distribution of agricultural materials attracts extensive attention. Given the slow development of rural logistics, the traditional agricultural material distribution process encounters many problems, such as cumbersome distribution links, high distribution costs, and low profit for enterprises, which in turn cause high production costs and low income for farmers. In consideration of battery energy consumption and soft time window constraints, this study adopted the agricultural material distribution route as the study object and established an optimization model of the agricultural material distribution route with fixed , transportation, energy consumption, time window penalty, and carbon emission costs as the objective functions. With regard to the algorithm, the operation of differential update and chaotic disturbance was innovatively enhanced and applied to the improved ant colony algorithm to simulate the model and obtain the optimal distribution route optimization model. Results show that the traditional ant colony algorithm improved by differential updating and chaotic disturbance has the advantages of low distribution cost, reasonable route, small number of activated vehicles, and short convergence time. Compared with the traditional ant colony algorithm, the improved ant colony algorithm can converge to the global optimum faster. This study provides guidance and suggestions on route selection and vehicle configuration to reduce costs and increase efficiency and offers certain theoretical support to alleviate urban traffic pollution and implement carbon trading policies in the future.

637-646

Authors: Yuzhi WANG, Yaoyu LI, Tengteng QU, Siyu WANG, Lili SUN, Wuping ZHANG, Fuzhong LI

The establishment of crop growth models enables the simulation of the impacts of environmental changes on crop growth, providing theoretical guidance for exploring the relationship between environmental factors and crop growth. The model used the growth cycle (GC) as the simulation time step and was built upon four sub-models: topology, photosynthesis, biomass allocation, and geometric morphology. It was quantitatively utilized the concept of effective accumulated temperature (EAT) and parameters such as sink and expansion rate were used to explain the allometric growth relationships among different organs. The R2 values for the geometric morphological parameters such as leaf length, leaf width, leaf area, and internode volume ranged from 0.78 to 0.94, while the F-values for the regression equations ranged from 1533.53 to 13949.51. The R2 values for simulating leaf, internode, and earhead biomass were 0.62-0.94, 0.74-0.97, and 0.98, respectively, with RMSE values ranging from 0.02 to 0.13 g for leaf biomass, 0.03 to 0.13 g for internode biomass, and 1.71 g for earhead biomass. The results indicated that the model exhibited good performance and reliability in simulating the growth and development of leaves, internodes, and earheads. This provides a solid foundation for the development of a millet model with functional-structural feedback.

657-666

Authors: Huaming HOU, Shuai CUI, Dengming LI, Zhigang LI, Yisheng CHEN

In order to maintain the storage quality of strawberry after harvest and study the effect of low voltage electrostatic field (LVEF)-assisting refrigerated storage on strawberries quality, the study applied the low voltage electrostatic field (3kV 4±1℃ in LVEF group) to store strawberries in refrigeration environment, and setting refrigerated storage at 4±1°C as the control (CK group). The results showed that the freshness days of strawberries refrigerated by low voltage electrostatic field were twice as long as those of refrigerated group. The brightness and red-green degree of strawberries in LVEF group were 1.5 times and 2 times of those in CK group, respectively. The peak hardness of strawberry in LVEF group was 1.43 times of that in CK group, and the hardness decline range was 18.97% lower than that in CK group. The decreasing ranges of Total soluble solids (TSS), Titratable acids (TA) and Vitamin C(VC) in LVEF group were 43.91%, 60.01% and 46.17% lower than those in CK group, respectively. The increment of Malondialdehyde (MDA) of strawberries in LVEF group was 19.77% lower than that in CK group, and the activity peak of Superoxide dismutase (SOD) of strawberries in LVEF group was 1.22 times of that in CK group, and the decreasing range was 22.86% lower than that in CK group. After 10 days of storage, the weight loss rate and decay rate of strawberries in LVEF group and CK group were 16.69%, 15% and 70.65%, 59.45%, respectively. In conclusion, applying low voltage electrostatic field to refrigerated storage can effectively inhibit the quality deterioration of strawberries during refrigerated storage period.

681-689

Authors: Iuliana STANA, Paula TUDOR, Alexandru CIRIC, Mihaela BEGEA, Gheorghe VOICU, Vasilica STEFAN

Optimizing the process of obtaining butter requires experiments in laboratory conditions, where some parameters need to be adjusted and monitored. For a low-capacity churn with a horizontal semi-helical paddle, the beating time was determined depending on the speed of the beater and the fat content of the cream. At a fat content of 30% in the cream, the butter percentage obtained at low speeds was 27.7%, while for a speed of 3000 rpm a butter percentage of only 21.3% was obtained. The paper also presents other results necessary for establishing the functional parameters of small churns.

703-712

Authors: Ancuta MARIN, Vili DRAGOMIR, Ruxandra POP, Marian BUTU

Mechanization is a fundamental aspect of agricultural sector modernization, bringing with it both benefits and challenges. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the degree of mechanization of Romanian agriculture and identify the major trends that marked the evolution of this process in the last ten years. Regional differences in the degree of mechanization were also explored, highlighting the particularities and challenges of each region. This analysis will provide a comprehensive perspective on the impact of mechanization in agriculture in Romania and will serve as a basis for the formulation of appropriate agricultural policies for the sustainable development of the country's agricultural sector.

725-733

Authors: Shilei KANG, Yanshun XU, Jingpu ZHOU, Bin TONG, Junlin HE

The contact parameters between calcium fruit and comb teeth are the key to the virtual picking test. In this paper, the physical test of free-falling impacting plate on the self-built test bench and the centre rotation composite simulation test of rigid body dynamics were carried out. The relationship between the contact parameters and dynamic characteristics was obtained, and the contact model was optimized. The contact stiffness k=0.868, force index e=1.91 and damping C=5.56E-4 were obtained when the height of the free falling body was 500 mm. The model was applied to lower free-fall simulation test, and the obtained results were in good agreement with the physical test results. The contact model can be used in the subsequent picking simulation.

745-754

Authors: YongZheng YANG, HongBo WANG, ZhiCheng XIE, JunMao LI, ZiLu HUANG

In order to realize the automatic driving of agricultural machinery in greenhouse, this paper uses image acquisition equipment to collect road images in greenhouse and makes data sets, builds SETR model based on Transformer framework and DeepLabv3+ model based on convolution neural network for semantic segmentation of road images in greenhouse, and verifies the semantic segmentation ability of the two models to road images in greenhouse. Several groups of training periods are set as observation points to observe the semantic segmentation effect of the two models on the greenhouse road image, and the test set which has not been trained by the model is used as the prediction object to verify the performance of the two models on the semantic segmentation of greenhouse road image. The SETR model reached 94.64% PA on the greenhouse road data set, and 82.72% mIoU, DeepLabv3+ model reached 90.80% PA and 72.35% mIoU on the greenhouse road data set. Both models have excellent performance in semantic segmentation of greenhouse road images, and the performance of SETR model is slightly better than that of DeepLabv3+ model. The semantic segmentation performance of the two models for greenhouse road images can meet the needs of actual deployment.

765-775

Authors: Junzheng ZHAO, Jinliang GONG, Yanfei ZHANG

In order to rationally plan the amount of tasks and task areas for each agricultural robot in the farm, a cloud-side collaborative task allocation scheme is proposed. The cloud platform divides farm tasks based on field obstacles and extracts the center of gravity prime points for each farm task; plasmas as regional task target points through dynamic genetic algorithms for near-field aggregation, after accelerating the solution process by dynamic crossover and variational operators, the Metropolis criterion is introduced to eliminate the local optimal solution of the algorithm and obtain the globally optimal allocation solution. Simulation experiments show that the optimal allocation reduces 9.21%, 5.66%, and 7.21% in the total cost compared to the random allocation, and the feasibility of the algorithm is proved experimentally. Reasonable task allocation can improve the overall production efficiency of agriculture, which is informative for unmanned farms operating in large areas

785-797

Authors: Kun CHEN, Xianliang WANG, Jiangtao JI, Xiangcai ZHANG, Xiupei CHENG, Hua ZHOU, Zhongcai WEI, Lei LIU, Mingyue BAI, Shang GAO

Understanding the soil-straw disturbance pattern of the key component parameters of the straw mixing winged chisel plow is the key to designing and optimizing the straw mixing winged chisel plow (a chisel plow for mixing and mulching straw). In this study, a straw-soil-winged chisel plow interaction model was established, and the working principle, key components of the winged chisel plow were determined based on soil bin experiment and theoretical analysis. Discrete element method (DEM) was used to study the influence of disturbance pattern of key components of the winged chisel plow on soil-straw displacement, straw mixing rate and draught force. The results show that the main components of the winged chisel plow that affect the operating efficiency of the implement are the soil lifting plate height, the wing mounting height and the wing width. The height of the soil lifting plate affects the efficiency of the winged chisel plow in secondary disturbance of soil-straw and its own performance in turning over soil, with an optimal range of 110 mm-170 mm. The installation height of the wing mounting mainly affects the position of the soil lifting plate in the soil layer. In order to achieve the best operating effect, the position of the soil lifting plate needs to meet the "lower lifting and upper turning" requirement. The optimal installation height of the wing mounting is 95 mm-145 mm. The width of the wing mainly affects the working width of the implement, and its optimal value is 180 mm-220 mm. The width of the wing mainly affects the working width of the implement, and its optimal value is 180 mm-220 mm. The established simulation relative error is within 12.60%, which can better study the disturbance pattern of soil-straw. This study may provide a reference for optimizing and designing wing-type chisel plows and subsoil shovels.

808-817

Authors: Radu CIUPERCĂ, Ana ZAICA, Vasilica STEFAN, Petruţa PETCU, Lucian DUMITRESCU, Oana CRISTEA

Following the bibliographic and theoretical research carried out by the specialists of INMA Bucharest Institute, as well as the experience of sea buckthorn producers and processors, the experimental model of a high-performance equipment for separating frozen sea buckthorn fruits from the harvested mass (branches, fruits and leaves) was designed and made. Thus, the subject of this paper is the experimental research carried out on an improved equipment for detaching and separating frozen sea buckthorn fruits from the branches - ESFC. After an introduction in which the current state in the field was highlighted, the tested equipment was presented with the main functional parameters, adjustments necessary to obtain an optimal working regime suitable for the processed raw material. Following the experiments carried out, the main working indices of the equipment were determined, among which: the working capacity, the degree of separation of the fruits from impurities as well as the optimal functional regimes. Following the tests carried out, in two variants of arrangement of the paddle arms on the separation rotor, some conclusions were formulated, the most eloquent of which was that, for the equipment tested in Variant II equipped with the separation rotor, the highest values for the feed flow resulted for the angle of inclination of the paddle of 450 and the rotation speed of the rotor of 90 min-1 and a high degree of separation.

834-842

Authors: Xin DU, Tong WANG, Shufa CHEN, Qixin SUN, Zhihao XU, Changqing LIU

In order to improve the adaptability of the fertilizer point-applied device to the working speed, the key components of the high-speed fertilizer point-applied device were designed and simulated by numerical calculation in this study. The effects of working speed, discharging height and discharging mass on the distribution length of fertilizer particles were analyzed by a one-factor test, and a suitable range of factors was determined. The Box-Behnken test was conducted to investigate the interaction effect of the three factors on the distribution length of fertilizer particles, and the quadratic regression was fitted to the test results to establish the regression equations of working speed, discharging height and discharging mass on the distribution length of fertilizer particles, and the optimal combinations of the parameters of working speed, discharging height and discharging mass were obtained by solving the equations. Finally, the reliability and authenticity of the simulation analysis were verified by bench test.

857-864

Authors: Alexandru-Vlad HELLER, Nicolae FILIP, Teodora DEAC

Faults and failures analyses consist of a very varied field of technique, so concepts and reliability indicators help us to determine the types of faults easier, their appearance in functioning and mathematical relations for determining the types of failures. Regarding to, the test stands help us to identify accelerated of noises, vibration and serious faults that occur in use and can lead to disposal of equipment, helping engineers quickly find the optimal solutions for most cases. Current methods used to determine agricultural tractors gearboxes reliability are those in open energy flow, they better simulate the real working conditions. We design a gearbox test stand for a rapid noise and vibration reliability diagnoses and tests. Considering the gearbox work conditions and its random possible failures, the stand will be equipped with transducers and a data acquisition system for data collection.

882-890

Authors: Georgiana MOICEANU, Mirela - Nicoleta DINCĂ, Mihai CHIȚOIU, Gigel PARASCHIV, Oana-Diana CRISTEA

Biomass is currently the most widespread form of renewable energy, and its exploitation is constantly increasing due to concerns about the major impact of fossil fuel consumption, in terms of climate change, global warming and their negative impact on the human factor. Biomass can be transformed using modern technologies into solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels. One of the most widely used biomass biofuels is wood pellets. Pellets obtained from woody biomass represent a very successful renewable energy source, due to their characteristics that include high density, high calorific value, low moisture content, but also ease of storage and transport. Romania's biomass pellet industry has recorded significant growth due to the increasing demand for green energy. Investment in modern technology improves production efficiency and enhances competitiveness in international markets. However, fluctuations in raw material prices such as biomass transportation costs and moisture content often affect profit margins. Improving infrastructure and continued investment in research and development are crucial to strengthening Romania’s position in the global renewable energy market. In this context, the purpose of the article is to present an analysis for Romanian pellet market industry.

11-20

Authors: Mihai Gabriel MATACHE, Iuliana GĂGEANU, Gabriel Valentin GHEORGHE, Cătălin PERSU, Marian CHIRIȚESCU, Mihaela NITU

The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for chemical application has become a topic of great interest to both researchers and the market in recent times. Producers have proposed the use of drones for joint spraying as a means of enhancing precision agriculture and productivity. However, chemical spraying is a highly specialized field where the quality of the spray is critical so the used UAV have to be precise and reliable. Within this paper will be presented the process of developing a tricopter-hexarotor chassis type UAV, electrically driven, fitted with a 66 litres tank and 6 anti-drift nozzles which will be used for precision spraying of agricultural crops based on preprogrammed flying missions.

37-44

Authors: Yinping ZHANG, Xin YANG, Xiaoran LI, Zhenwei WANG, Hua ZHOU, Jiasheng WANG

In this paper, a small pneumatic vegetable precision seeder suitable for facility greenhouses was designed. Based on the traditional positive and negative pressure seed-metering device, the airway disc structure was designed, and the negative pressure air chamber was divided into three separate air chambers. The separate air chambers could solve the problems of high-pressure requirements of traditional seed-metering device with large air chamber and suitable for small power machineries more. One, two, or three rows drill can be completed by replacing the seed plate and divider. The seed discharge process of the seed-metering device was analyzed and the bench test was performed. Results showed that the required pressure of the seed-metering device with the airway disk was 1 kPa less than traditional seed-metering device with large air chamber when the eligible rate of seed discharge was 95%. Field experiments were performed, results showed that the best performance were achieved under the speed of 3 km/h, for 3.72 % missed, 1.93% repeat and 94.35 % of inner ring, and 5.72%, 1.87% and 92.41% respectively of outer, meeting the requirements for vegetable seeding.

57-65

Authors: Lili SUN, Yuzhi WANG, Yaoyu LI, Xiaoying ZHANG, Wuping ZHANG, Fuzhong LI

Maize is one of the characteristic species in Shanxi Province. It has strong drought and cold tolerance. The study of maize growth and development law through the construction of the model is helpful to accurately understand the growth characteristics of maize, improve the yield, and further provide an important theoretical basis for the realization of precision agriculture. In this paper, "Xianyu 335" maize was taken as the research object. The data of leaf length, leaf width, stem length, stem number and tassel length, as well as leaf, stem, tassel, ear, cob and root organ morphology and biomass of maize during the whole growth period were obtained by field experiment. The maize geometric form structure module was constructed. The dynamic simulation of maize growing process was realized by object-oriented programming in Visual Studio software platform. With the help of 3D OpenGL graphic library Nurbs (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) curve and surface simulation technology, the growth visualization of maize organs was realized based on the idea of curve and surface control point selection parameter modeling.

76-85

Authors: Yanli GENG, Xiaodong YUE, Yankai JI, Yanbo LIN, Yanfang FU, Shucai YANG

Body size of pigs is an important evaluation indicator in pig breeding. The traditional method of body size measurement is usually in manual way, which requires more employees and causes stress reactions of pigs. In response to the shortcomings of the traditional methods, this paper designed a system for measuring the body size of pigs based on stereo vision. The point cloud of both the calibration object and the pig was collected using dual KinectV2 cameras. Pre-processing was conducted using filtering and random sample consensus to remove background noise from the point clouds. As there was limited overlap between the two sides of the point clouds, the rotation matrix obtained from registering the calibration object was applied to the pig point clouds. Curve fitting and slicing were then utilized to measure the pig's body dimensions, including length, width, height, and abdominal circumference. The results of the study indicated that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was 2.13% for body length, 1.02% for body width, 1.05% for body height, and 2.21% for abdominal girth. These results demonstrate the high accuracy and practical production value of the system.

96-106

Authors: Chen YAN, Wenxia ZHANG, Guo HUA, Fu SHI, Zhang RUI, Zhang MING

In the process of revegetation of degraded grassland by pneumatic seed sprayer, the working parameters of the sprayer, such as the position of the sprayer and the air velocity of the inlet of the sprayer, have an impact on the uniformity of spraying. In this paper, 4BQD-40C pneumatic sprayer is taken as the research object. The influence of the compensation mechanism on the airflow velocity at the inlet of the barrel nozzle and the spraying quality is analyzed. The conclusions show that: (1) The planting trajectory of the sprayer inlet compensation mechanism is analyzed, and the planting trajectory equation is obtained, which lays a foundation for subsequent research. (2) The influence law of the opening height on the inlet airflow velocity of the nozzle is obtained, and the drop trajectory is adjusted by adjusting the inlet airflow velocity of the nozzle, and the area of the missed seeding area is reduced. (3) The time points of opening height adjustment and reset of the compensation mechanism in one cycle were obtained. At the same time, there is a lag time t1 due to changing the seed drop trajectory by adjusting the nozzle inlet airflow velocity. Due to this lag time, the compensation mechanism can be used to change the seed drop trajectory when the swing frequency is less than 7.3 min-1 to achieve optimization of the reseeded and missed seeding areas.

117-126

Authors: Hanzhuo REN, Wei LI, Shaobo YE, Bing XU

This study proposes a monocular vision navigation control system based on PID-fuzzy control, which travels along the edge of the path. It collects path image information through monocular vision, identifies the path edge through image processing to determine the preview point, and uses a combination of PID and fuzzy control to design a controller to track the preview point for path navigation. Firstly, coordinate calibration and conversion were performed on the monocular camera, achieving coordinate conversion from the image coordinate system to the world coordinate system. The accuracy of the calibration results was verified through experiments. According to the navigation strategy of driving along the edge of the path, the world coordinate equation of the path edge is obtained through image processing technology, and the preview point tracked by the navigation system is determined. The navigation parameters are determined based on the position of the preview point. The PID fuzzy controller system designed in this study can switch different control methods based on the position of the preview point. Finally, an experimental verification was conducted on the monocular visual navigation system of the control system. The verification results showed that the average error of the navigation control system in tracking the path when driving in a straight line was 0.039 m, the average error when turning left was 0.079 m, and the average error when turning right was 0.121 m. The error range can meet the basic requirements of agricultural robot farmland operations. Research has shown that the navigation strategy based on PID-fuzzy joint controller to track the preview point along the path edge has a good effect on the visual navigation control system of agricultural robots. This study provides important reference value for the research and development of monocular visual navigation systems of agricultural robots.

137-146

Authors: Chong TAO, Zhiye MO, Fangyuan LU, Zhihe LI, Dianbin SU, Yinping ZHANG

The contact parameters setting determines the accuracy of discrete element method (DEM) simulation analysis, while there is a lack of research on contact parameters of green onion seed. In this paper, the physical parameters of green onion seeds were measured by experiment, and the DEM parameters were calibrated by simulation. Based on EDEM software, the Hertz-Mindlin no-slip model was used to create the particle model of green onion seeds that takes on the shape of peltate with the irregular surface, and the repose angle was measured by the measurement method of lifted cylinder. Plackett-Burman test was designed to screen the significance of parameters, and the optimal range of significance parameters was further determined through the steepest climbing test. Then the regression model of seeds repose angle was obtained by Box-Behnken test and the optimal parameter combination was calculated: the static friction factor between seeds was 0.424, the rolling friction factor was 0.085, the static friction factor between seeds and steel was 0.310. The optimized repose angle in the simulation had an overall relative error of 0.54%, indicating that the contact parameters of the calibrated green onion seed had high accuracy.

155-164

Authors: Gabriel Alexandru CONSTANTIN, Bianca Stefania ZABAVA, Gheorghe VOICU, Georgiana MOICEANU, Irina Aura ISTRATE, Mihaela NITU

The objective of the present study was to make a theoretical study based on a CFD analysis for a conventional radial clarifier. The parameters of the Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis were set in the Ansys software, and after running the simulation, the values for fluid velocity, turbulence intensity and Reynolds number were obtained. Thus, it was obtained a fluid velocity of 0.103 m/s, a turbulence intensity of 3.82·10-2 % and a Reynolds number of 147. This work can help researchers in the field, mainly, but also radial clarifier manufacturers to optimise the process.

173-180

Authors: Xiangbing ZHU, Yuge BI, Jianmin DU, Xinchao GAO, Eerdumutu JIN, Fei HAO

Rat-hole area and number of rat holes are indicators of the level of degradation and rat damage in grassland environments. However, rat-hole monitoring has consistently relied on manual ground surveys, leading to extremely low efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) model suitable for rat-hole recognition in desert grassland monitoring, called grassland monitoring-CBAM, is proposed that comprehensively incorporates unmanned aerial vehicle hyperspectral remote-sensing technology and deep-learning methods. Validation results show that the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the model were 99.35% and 98.90%, which were 3.96% and 3.35% higher, respectively, than those of the basic model. This study represents a breakthrough in the intelligent interpretation of rat holes and provides technical support for the subsequent rapid interpretation of grassland rat holes and rat damage evaluation. It also provides a solution for the fine classification and quantitative inversion of similar landscape features.

191-200

Authors: Jing TIAN, Jiayuan SHAO, Xinyue SONG, Ying WANG, Tingting YANG, Lili NIE, Zhenyu LIU

Livestock scale breeding is the inevitable trend of future livestock and poultry husbandry. Closed breeding requires excellent environment and livestock and poultry housings contain a lot of dust, pathogenic microorganisms and harmful gases, affecting the health of livestock and poultry and breeding personnel. Most of the common sterilization and dust collection devices for livestock and poultry housings on the market are too high energy consumption, and easy to cause secondary pollution. Therefore, an environmental purification device was designed to absorb dust in the air and kill harmful bacteria by using high voltage pulsed electric field. The device was designed using phase control principle and bundled conductor. COMSOL Multiphysics software was used to simulate the layout of single conductor, twin bundled conductor and quad bundled conductor. It was found that when the conductor was designed as twin bundled conductor or quad bundled conductor, the gradient distribution of spatial electric field intensity was more uniform and the downward trend of electric field was slower, which could effectively improve the dust collection and sterilization efficiency of the device. At the same time, a variety of electric field environments can be set up by using phase difference to meet different environmental requirements of livestock and poultry. The compound dust collection and sterilization device with phase-controlled bundled conductor for livestock and poultry housing space includes high voltage pulse generator, bundled conductor, high voltage special timer, insulator and other parts, which can effectively reduce the dust content in the air, the concentration of pathogenic bacteria, harmful gases, etc. after assembly test and can also reduce the humidity in the livestock and poultry housings.

211-220

Authors: Weiwei CHENG, Yu WANG, Changchao WANG, Tao WANG, Junlin HE, Zhouhua LIU

The sunken solar greenhouse is suitable for the development of vertical planting, which results in higher yield. In order to investigate the effect of temperature on photosynthesis of plants, an experimental study was conducted on the temperature and photosynthesis of strawberry plants at different heights in the sunken solar greenhouse. The study showed that when the indoor temperature was higher than 25.5℃, the photosynthesis of plants was inhibited; the transpiration rate decreased by 3.89 and photosynthesis rate decreased by 3.95 when the air temperature increased from 25.5℃ to 33.3℃ and then decreased to 25.4℃ at a height of 1.8m from the indoor floor; there were temperature differences in the vertical direction between the indoor temperatures of the sunken heliostat. The maximum temperatures at 0 m, 0.6 m, 1.0 m, 1.4 m, and 1.8 m height were 20.6°C, 24.1°C, 25.4°C, 25.4°C, 33, and 3°C, respectively, and different temperatures would have different photosynthetic characteristics of plants. This study can provide basic support for greenhouse regulation.

232-238

Authors: Volodymyr BULGAKOV, Semjons IVANOVS, Volodymyr KUVACHОV, Valerii ADAMCHUK, Viktor KAMINSKIY

One of the ways to improve the maneuverability of wheeled axle machines when they move along the tracks of a constant technological track is the use of onboard turning. This simplifies the layout, increases the useful volume of the machine due to the release of niches in the machine body, necessary for placing the steering wheels when turning. However, the question of the efficiency of onboard turning of axle machines by the criterion of power input remains insufficiently studied. The aim of the research is to substantiate the criterion of the power required to implement on-board turns of an overhead machine. Theoretical research, synthesis of design schemes, parameters and modes of operation of bridge machines have been carried out by simulating on a personal computer the conditions of their functioning. The basics of theoretical mechanics and tractor theory were the basis of the research methods. As a result of the research, it has been established that power (onboard) turning is widely used for wheeled machines and has a prospect of application on bridge machines used in the track farming system. Approbation of the developed methodology of determining power inputs for power (onboard) turning of wheeled axle machines has shown that under the accepted conditions of turning the power required for turning of the axle machine is 28% of the engine power at a speed of 5 km⸱h–1. As the gauge of the bridge machine increases, the total power required for the power (onboard) turn increases exponentially

251-264

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

Aiming at the problems of single mechanical performance, multi-person operation and low operation efficiency of air-suction jujube harvesting in China, combined with the requirements of mechanized jujube harvesting in Xinjiang, this study designed a self-propelled jujube collection strip pick-up machine. The machine is mainly composed of crawler chassis, landing jujube collection strip device, separation and impurity removal device and hydraulic system. According to the jujube planting mode, the size of the crawler chassis is 1780 mm × 1650 mm × 310 mm. In order to simulate the effect of artificial collecting strips, a reciprocating collecting strip blowing head was designed with a height of 15 cm from the ground, a horizontal and vertical angle of 35° and 15° respectively. The model of the collecting fan is selected as 9-19-4A; the fluid simulation analysis of the separation and impurity removal box is carried out to verify the rationality of the box structure design. The performance of the picker was tested by pick-up efficiency, cleanliness, breakage, and impurity rates. The results show that when the forward velocity was about 0.40 m·s-1, the average pick-up efficiency could reach 752.7 km·h-1, the average pick-up cleanliness rate was 95.66 %, the average breakage rate was 2.68 %, and the average impurity rate was 3.64 %. The self-propelled jujube collection strip pick-up machine designed in this experiment meets the requirements of mechanized harvesting of jujube and can realize single-person remote control operation.

275-286

Authors: Yinping ZHANG, Bin WANG, Xin LI, Hua ZHOU, Fangyuan LU, Jiasheng WANG

Facilities greenhouses are relatively narrow and airtight, and the machine operation turns frequently. The existing vegetable seeders is supported by manual hand, and the straightness of operation is poor, Turning around is time-consuming and laborious. This paper designs a remote control system of small vegetable seeder based on Arduino microcontroller, the Arduino single-chip microcomputer remote control technology, multi-motor synchronous drive technology, differential-electric push rod combined with lifting and steering control and other methods are adopted, Through remote control, the forward, speed regulation, lifting of the whole machine and field line change and steering of the seeder during vegetable sowing are realized. The differential steering model and brushless motor speed control model are established, and the android human-computer interaction APP is designed to realize the remote precise control of vegetable seeder. The performance test of the accuracy of the control system was carried out with the accuracy and steering accuracy of the seeder. The results showed that : under the condition of medium speed and medium and low speed operation, the seeding level of vegetable seeder is the most stable and reliable, the speed deviation rate of the seeder is 1.59 %, after starting the drive motor for 2s, the actual speed is close to the target speed, differential steering is relatively accurate, the qualified rate of steering is more than 89.8 %, the synchronous speed error of the lifting mechanism tends to be stable.This study can provide reference for the development of intelligent equipment for facility agriculture.

299-308

Authors: Carlos MONTES-RODRÍGUEZ, Miguel HERRERA-SUÁREZ, María LÓPEZ-ZAMORA, Julio PÉREZ-GUERRERO, Roberto TORRES-RODRÍGUEZ

For tagua, the quality of the polishing process is analyzed according to the surface finish of the material, which is obtained manually or through empirically developed machinery that does not include the study of the behavior of the material during the process, which generates an inefficient work. The objective of the work is to determine the macro structural properties of tagua nuts to simulate polishing using the discrete element method. Virtual models were developed and the corresponding physical and mechanical properties were assigned. Among the main results, a tagua nut model was achieved, with m=30.22 g and ρ=1327.3±11.23 kg/m3, friction coefficient for wood of µ_e = 0.411±0.0006 and angle of repose of β=24.644º±0.201º. These properties are the variables used as input data for the DEM model. Finally, the suitability of the Hertz-Mindlin model to simulate the process of mechanized polishing of tagua nuts is demonstrated.

320-327

Authors: Krasimir TRENDAFILOV, Galin TIHANOV, Vanya STOYKOVA, Galya SHIVACHEVA

Increasing the productivity of machine tractor units when cultivating the field is achieved by reducing the work time, which usually relates to seeking the shortest path of the unit in the field. Reducing the length of headland turns, which account for the largest proportion of the unit non-working moves, will result in higher productivity as well as less soil compaction in the headland. The article presents an algorithm for selection of a turn in the headland of a field of irregular shape. Existing theoretical correlations have been used to determine the length of the non-working move and the headland width when making T-turns. The selection of a turn is made on the basis of the minimum length of the non-working move, after which the width of the needed headland for the selected turn is calculated. This algorithm can be added to the on-board computer of the unit thus providing a more efficient way of moving, automatically generating a headland and following the trajectory of the selected turn by the unit.

337-349

Authors: Min FU, Rongfeng LI, Yilin HAO, Fanhua MENG, Jiacheng ZHOU, Chengmeng WANG

When the seeding monomer of no-tillage maize planter operates in sticky and wet soil, soil bonding and blocking of soil-touching parts will occur to different degrees, leading to functional failure and affecting the quality of seeding operation. Aiming to improve the anti-adhesion property with minimum cost, a seeding monomer is modified to operate in sticky and wet soil with the support of TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). There are two major scheme adjustments, including self-cleaning seedbed collating device and split gauge wheel. The Su-field model of seedbed collating device is constructed, and the design scheme of smaller wavy coulter and dirt scraper is proposed on the basis of the standard-solution tool and water-film theory. And the parameters of the wave are determined on account of force analysis of soil particles and bionic earthworm. Based on the systemic-functional analysis of the seeding depth-limiting device and the force analysis of gauge wheel during operation, a split type of depth-gauge wheel with large lug hole is designed. As a result, the field trial demonstrates that the improved monomer could meet the operation requirements of clay soil with the water content of 15%-25%. Compared with the original model, the residual clay content is decreased (seedbed collating device 57.5%, gauge wheel seeding depth-limiting device 10%). This study can provide reference for the anti-adhesion design of soil-contacting parts of agricultural machinery.

359-368

Authors: Yin XU, Jiadong JIN, Songwei ZENG, Yun ZHANG, Qinglai XIAO

In this paper, the development of a portable, multifunctional water quality monitoring system for aquaculture that is based on IoT technology is presented. The system integrates a main control module, sensor module, Human Machine Interface (HMI) module, Wi-Fi module and power module, and is equipped with system software based on Real Time Operating System (RTOS) for scheduling tasks. The main control module collects crucial water quality information, including water temperature (WT), dissolved oxygen (DO), ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N), and pH, through the sensor module and facilitates data interaction with the HMI module. The proposed aquaculture water quality evaluation model utilizes water quality parameters as input to assign a grade based on the evaluation result. These parameters are transmitted wirelessly to the OneNet cloud platform using Wi-Fi modules, enabling users to remotely monitor the water quality through a visual interface. The system structure has been meticulously designed to accommodate both portable and fixed-point remote monitoring applications. The experimental results demonstrate that the system is accurate, stable, and cost-effective, providing a reliable and efficient solution for intelligent aquaculture in small and medium-sized enterprises.

379-390

Authors: Shenghe BAI, Yanwei YUAN, Gaoyong XING, Liang WEI, Kang NIU, Liming ZHOU, Bo ZHAO, Liguo WEI, Lijing LIU

To realize real-time monitoring of film laying process of cotton precision planter and improve intelligent level of cotton precision planter, based on advanced morphological filtering method and graphical programming of Labview software, a film laying quality monitoring system of cotton precision planter is designed. Using the Vision Assistant visual assistant, the system uses a color extraction function to convert colors to grayscale images. It uses LOOKup Table function and FFT filter function to perform grayscale transformation, binarization and advanced morphological filtering on it respectively. It then uses basic morphology to acquire various components in the plastic film image. It realizes the monitoring of parameters such as the width of the daylighting surface, the side length or seam length of the mechanical damaged part, and the width of the film edge covering soil. The performance test results of the film laying quality monitoring system showed that the system worked stably and reliably, the average monitoring accuracy of the width of the lighting surface and the width of the film edge covering soil reached more than 95%, and the average monitoring accuracy of the side length or the length of the seam at the mechanical damage part reached more than 88%. It solved the problems of difficulty in recognizing the similarity between the plastic film and the background interferer (soil, etc.) and could accurately detect the quality of the cotton film in real time. It effectively improved the operation quality and working efficiency of the cotton precision planter and met the practical requirements of film laying monitoring.

401-414

Authors: Xu LI, Shuqi SHANG, Xiaoning HE, Zelong ZHAO, Ning ZHANG, Yaxiu HOU, Jinbiao ZHANG, Dongwei WANG

For a peanut picking device with a feeding rate greater than 5 kg/s, the problem of low picking rate and high damage rate will occur during the picking process. A discrete element model is developed to determine the range of values of the main influencing factors affecting the peanut picking device. A three-factor, three-level orthogonal combination test was carried out with feeding volume, drum speed, and peanut picking gap as test factors to investigate the effects of the main influencing factors on the quality of peanut picking operation of the peanut picking device. The results of the field trials showed that the best results were achieved at the optimum combination of drum speed of 508 r·min-1, peanut picking gap of 22 mm, and feeding volumes of 6.3 kg/s. At this time, the peanut picking rate was 99.17%, and the peanut breakage rate was 0.91, meeting the standard technical requirements for mechanized peanut harvesting. The study results provide a theoretical basis for further enhancing the development of peanut combine harvesting equipment.

423-430

Authors: Chengyi ZHONG, Wenqing YIN, Dejiang LIU, Keheng YAO, Wei CHEN, Zitao XING, Fan Jin

In view of the complex agronomic technology of highland barley production and the lack of special machinery for harvesting and bundling highland barley, the harvesting of highland barley is basically done manually. There is a seriously reduced degree of mechanization of highland barley harvesting. Therefore, this paper designs a self-propelled highland barley harvesting and bundling machine, which realizes a single operation process to complete mechanized complex operations such as harvesting, bundling and laying highland barley. By designing the highland barley harvesting method and cutting platform, the height of the cutting platform can be adjusted stepless, and the highland barley bundle knotter is designed to realize the regulation and control of the baling diameter of the highland barley. According to the design of the rope feeding mechanism, the gathering mechanism and the baling mechanism, the main parameters of the baling device are determined. The stubble cutting height of the machine is 325 mm, the average diameter of the highland barley bundles is 195 mm, the average weight per bundle is 5.08 kg, bale formation rate is 97.8%, the qualification rate of the straw bundle reaches 95.6%, drop resistance rate is 92.6%, operating efficiency is 0.82 ha/h. The harvest baler runs in low speed 1 gear, the machine has high operation efficiency, high bundling rate of highland barley, good paving effect, reduced labor intensity, provides the mechanized efficiency of highland barley harvesting. Fuel consumption per hectare is 8.05 kg.hm-2, and the three shifts are without fault, to sum up, it can meet the requirements of highland barley harvesting and baling. The above research can provide a reference basis for the design of the highland barley harvesting baler.

441-454

Authors: Jinhui YU, Lili CHENG

With the development of the economy and society and the improvement of living standards, the demand for fresh products is increasing, and the huge demand has driven the rapid growth of fresh products in China. However, fresh products are prone to spoilage and wear, and higher transportation requirements are put forward to ensure product quality. Based on this, the transportation function of cold chain logistics vehicles on farm products cold chain logistics greatly improves the cold chain transportation efficiency of agricultural products. Aiming at the vehicle path problem of cold chain logistics distribution and under multiple refrigerated trucks, a single distribution center, and multiple commodity types, a path optimization model of cold chain logistics vehicles was established with the optimal evaluation of total distribution cost and distribution vehicles as the objective considering the economy, greenness, and sustainability of vehicles. Then, an evaluation index system of refrigerated trucks consisting of cost index, environmental index and quality index was established, an AHP-TOPSIS (Analytic Hierarchy Process, Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) evaluation model of refrigerated trucks was constructed, and the comprehensive evaluation value of refrigerated trucks was obtained. On the basis of vehicle evaluation results, the corresponding vehicle path optimization model of agricultural cold chain logistics was established, the large-scale neighborhood search SA algorithm was designed to solve an example, and the optimization model was compared with the optimization model without considering vehicle evaluation. The experimental results show that considering the vehicle evaluation factors can effectively reduce the distribution cost, and increasing the vehicle evaluation weight can effectively improve the greenness and sustainability of the distribution fleet.

468-476

Authors: Weiqiang PI, Rongyang WANG, Qinliang SUN, Yingjie WANG, Bo LU, Guanyu LIU, Kaiqiang JIN

The quality of white tea buds is the basis of the quality of finished tea, and sorting white tea buds is a laborious, time-consuming, and key process in the tea-making process. For intelligent detection of white tea buds, this study established the YOLOv5+BiFPN model based on YOLOv5 by adding a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) structure to the neck part. By comparing the YOLOv5 and YOLOv3 through the ablation experiment, it was found that the YOLOv5+BiFPN model could extract the fine features of white tea buds more effectively, and the detection average precision for one bud and one leaf was 98.7% and mAP@0.5 was 96.85%. This study provides a method and means for white tea bud detection based on deep learning image detection, and provides an efficient, accurate, and intelligent bud detection model for high-quality white tea sorting.

487-496

Authors: Suhardi Suhardi, Bambang Marhaenanto, Bayu Taruna Widjaja Putra, Sugeng Winarso

The water availability in soil strongly influences crop growth by sustaining photosynthesis, respiration, and the maintenance of plant temperature. The water availability will decrease due to crop evapotranspiration (ETc) which is influenced by reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and crop coefficient (Kc). During water shortage, Kc is strongly influenced by soil evaporation coefficient (Ke) and basal crop coefficient (Kcb) which can be calculated using the Blue Red Vegetation Index (BRVI). The purpose of this study was to apply and evaluate a new method of estimating ETo, Ke, and Kcb at a research site using a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with minimum requirements. The results of the ETo estimation using DNN shows a good output with a determinant coefficient (R2) being 0.774. Meanwhile, the estimates of Ke and Kcb show excellent results with the determinant coefficient (R2) being 0.9496 and 0.999 respectively.

506-516

Authors: Dragos PREDA, Bogdan DURAN, Adrian PANDELE, Oana-Diana MANOLELI-PREDA, Aneta IONESCU

Governmental incentives, technological progress, and lowering costs have made renewable energy more accessible and more affordable for residential areas. Switching to renewable energy sources not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also provides long-term financial gains, energy independence, and a cleaner environment for communities. In this study, a numerical analysis of a vertical-axis wind turbine layout that is easily adaptable to populated areas was conducted. Among the results are the variation of the torque coefficient during the course of a complete 360-degree rotation and the vorticity magnitude evolution at the nominal point. In order to validate the numerical results, a test campaign will be conducted inside the wind tunnel as part of further study. This campaign will be carried out using an experimental small-scale model.

527-538

Authors: Qiang SU, Xuying LI, Fandi ZENG, Hongbin BAI, Junyue WANG

The sandy loam soil has complex movement characteristics during hole formation by hanging cup transplanters. In order to better investigate this point, the paper aims to investigate the disturbance pattern of transplanter vibration on sandy loam soil and the movement characteristics of soil particles by the discrete element method. The vibration characteristics of the transplanter operating on sandy loam soil were tested and analyzed, and the motion law of vibration parameters on sandy loam soil was investigated with the help of the discrete element method and soil bin test. The results showed that the vibration acceleration of the transplanter increased with the forward speed, the primary vibration frequency range was from 0 to 12 Hz, and the vibration amplitude increased linearly in the field of 1.21 to 9.19 mm. The Central Composite test resulted in the regression equations of vibration amplitude and vibration frequency on the average movement velocity of the particles. The response surface analysis showed that the effect of vibration amplitude on the average movement velocity of particles was greater than the effect of vibration frequency on the average movement velocity of particles. At the same time, the average movement velocity of the particles tends to increase significantly under the interaction of the two. This study provides data to support the design of planters for sandy loam soils, which is beneficial to promote seedling transplanting technology further.

549-556

Authors: Jamal AL DOURI, Valentin APOSTOL, Horatiu POP, Tudor PRISECARU, Cornel Constantin PAVEL, Iulian UTA, Claudia IONITA

The paper aims to investigate how to improve the performance of a refrigeration system (Rs) that equips a cold room, by incorporating phase change materials (Phase Change Materials - PCMs) in these systems, a study that has not yet been extended experimentally. The study is carried out on a cold room within the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest - Faculty of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, Department of Thermodynamics, Engines, Thermal and Refrigeration Equipment. This room is equipped with a refrigeration system with mechanical vapour compression (VCRs), which uses R404A as refrigerant. Mechanical vapour compression refrigeration system (VCRs) with an evaporation temperature below 0oC causes ice to form on the evaporator leading to reduced performance. Currently, the widely used methods for defrosting are the standard methods, the most used being the electric one, which of course consumes energy. This paper aims to evaluate the availability of heat that could be used in the defrosting process by means of PCMs. The study was made using the Engineering Equation Solver software, several types of PCMs and also different refrigerants (R600a, R600, R1234yf, R1234ze, R152a, R290, R32) and in this way it was intended to identify the right agent to be used for a particular type of PCM.

570-582

Authors: Ruili WANG, Deshuai LI, Peiyuan LI, Xueyin BAI, Tiejun WANG, Wei WANG, Yingbo ZHAO

Straw found in the field can be conveniently stored and transported through mechanical packaging, and it undergoes crushing during its utilization. The effectiveness of the crushing process directly impacts the efficiency of material utilization. However, current crushing devices available in the market lack specialized mechanisms suitable for the unique characteristics of round corn stalks. To address this issue, the necessary simulation parameters were determined, and an experiment was conducted using the ternary quadratic combination test method. The test factors considered were the center height difference of the knife roller, lower roller speed, and cutter thickness. The response value of the experiment was the material crushing rate. By analyzing the results, the optimal structural parameters were identified. These included a center height difference of 390 mm for the knife roller, a lower roller speed of 14 rpm, and a cutter thickness of 110 mm. With these parameters, the crushing rate of the round straw crushing device reached 93.77%, and the particle passing ratio was 98.52%. To validate the research findings, a test device was constructed and used to confirm the reliability of the obtained results.

593-606

Authors: Petru CÂRDEI, Nicolae CONSTANTIN, Cătălin PERSU, Vergil MURARU, Raluca SFIRU, Mihaela NIȚU

The article presents results generated by research on the influence of forward speed on the traction resistance force for soil processing machines. Statistical estimators are proposed to highlight the intensity of the connection between the traction resistance force and the forward speed and an optimal evaluation method of an exponent of the work speed to explain as well as possible the behaviour of the traction resistance force. It is found that the variance and the standard deviation are the statistical estimators that highlight the most intensively the connection between the traction resistance force and the forward speed.

615-625

Authors: Jiapeng QU, Dong XU, Xiaohui HU, Ruihong TAN, Guotian HU

The precise detection and recognition are the premise in accurate prevention and control of tomato diseases. To improve the accuracy of tomato diseases recognition model, nine kinds of sick leaves images including tomato target spot bacteria in Plant Village and healthy leaves images were used. A new attention mechanism module called CBAM-Ⅱ was created by changing the serial connection between Channel and Spatial attentions of CBAM to parallel connection, and then the results of two modules were added together. CBAM-Ⅱ had been verified to be effective and universal in the convolutional neural network model. The accuracy of MobileNet-V2 with CBAM-Ⅱ model was 99.47%，which had increased by 1.13%, 0.93%, 0.7%8 and 1.06 % respectively comparing with MobileNet-V2 model, MobileNet-V2 plus Channel attention module, MobileNet-V2 plus Spatial attention module, and CBAM attention module. Furthermore, the accuracy of AlexNet, Inception-V3 and ResNet50 model has increased 1.73, 0.15 and 0.33 % respectively when the CBAM-Ⅱ module was added. Results showed that the proposed module CBAM-Ⅱ created in this experiment is more effective in MobileNet-V2 model for tomato diseases recognition, and could solve interference problems resulted from the serial connection. Additionally, the accuracy of four convolutional neural network models including Mobilenet-V2, AlexNet, Inception-V3 and ResNet50 model had all increased when the CBAM-Ⅱ module was added, which represented the good universality of CBAM-Ⅱ module. The results could provide technical support in accurate detection and control of tomato diseases.

11-20

Authors: Ye XIA, Xiaohui LEI, Andreas HERBST, Xiaolan LYU

Thinning is an important agronomic process in pear production, thus the detection of pear inflorescence is an important technology for intelligentization of blossom thinning. In this paper, images of buds and flowers were collected under different natural conditions for model training, and the images were augmented by data augmentation methods. Model training was performed based on the YOLOv5s network with coordinate attention mechanism added to the backbone network and compared with the native YOLOv5s, YOLOv3, SSD 300, and Faster-RCNN algorithms. The mAP, F1 score and recall of the algorithm reached 93.32%, 91.10%, and 91.99%. The model size only took up 14.1 MB, and the average detection time was 27 ms, which are suitable for application in actual intelligent blossom thinning equipment.

35-45

Authors: ZhongLing XIA, WeiHan CHEN, Hang ZHAO, WeiDong SONG, Ling YANG, MingJin YANG

In traditional Chinese Baijiu (white wine) brewing factory, most processes were usually done manually. In order to promote industrial automation in liquor brewing industry and alleviate highly repetitive manual labor, an industrial robot operating system equipped with machine vision was designed to accomplish caldron feeding process during the distillation of Chinese Baijiu. Firstly, Modified D-H method was used to establish robot kinematics model. Shovel actuators and peripheral devices were designed to spread and transport grains during caldron feeding process. After that, an online detection system based on machine vision and master computer were designed to control key parameters of caldron feeding process, including grains height, caldron pressure, robot speed and waiting time, etc. Finally, multiple brewing experiments were carried out on crushed grains and spent grains. The experimental results showed that robot system maximum working space was 3.15 m, which could feed 3 caldrons at the same time. During Chinese Baijiu distillation, air pressure average error in caldron was 8.28 %. High proportion of first-class liquor and second-class liquor was obtained, which met engineering production requirements.

55-64

Authors: Yujiang GOU, Huibo HE, Huaying LI, Daming WANG, Mian ZHANG

In order to solve the problems of low efficiency of fertilization and spraying in the hilly mountains of China, a vehicle-mounted fertilization and spraying machine was designed. The whole structure and working principle of the machine were described, and the key components of fertilization and spraying are designed. The kinetics and kinematics of fertilizer particles and droplets were modeled by theoretical analysis of their motion characteristics in the air. The fertilization and variable spraying control system based on the core controller MCU (Microcontroller Unit) was set up. And the system can adjust the rotational speed of the disc and can automatically change the spraying volume by real-time detection of forward speed to achieve a constant spraying volume per unit area. The test results showed that: when the disc speed was greater than 90 r/min, the uniformity coefficient of variation was less than 15%, which satisfied the operational requirements; the uniformity coefficient of variation reached the minimum value of 10.03% when the disc rotation speed was 180 r/min, and the best fertilization performance was achieved at this time. In the spraying system, the actual spraying volume increased with the increased forward speed, and the relative error between the theoretical flow rate and the actual flow rate was 6.25% at most, and the average error was 5.94%, which could achieve the purpose of variable spraying. The research results can provide technical reference for the design and development of fertilization and spraying machinery in hilly areas.

74-87

Authors: Junming HOU, Zhaotan REN, Liang ZHANG, Qijie SUN, Wei WANG

Mechanized harvesting of crops is very important in the field of agricultural engineering, then the brush harvesting is a common way. The comb brush device is divided into four types: comb tooth type, roller spring finger type, belt comb finger type, and rod comb finger type. The picking rate and breakage rate are the indexes to evaluate the effect of comb brush harvesting devices. How to improve the picking rate and reduce damage rate is of great significance to the popularization of the devices. To improve the picking rate, the design of comb teeth should conform to the growth characteristics of crops. In this study, the application of four comb brush devices in harvesting crops was introduced, then the working principles and results were summarized. Meanwhile, the research status of a variable finger spacing device was summarized. In addition, to study fruit damage caused by brush devices during harvesting, three common analysis methods were summarized. The application situations and key steps were listed, and the modeling methods of material fruit in simulation analysis were analyzed. The study is intended to provide a reference for improving the harvesting effect of comb brush device. In the future, with the deepening combination of agronomy and agricultural machinery technology, comb brush harvesters will be more widely applied.

99-108

Authors: Hongwen YAN, Zhiwei HU, Qingliang CUI

To explore the application of traditional machine learning model in the intelligent management of pigs, in this paper, the influence of Principal Components Analysis (this method is simply referred to as PCA) pre-treatment on pig face identification with Support Vector Machine (this method is simply referred to as SVM) is studied. By testing method, the kernel functions of two testing schemes, one adopting SVM alone and the other adopting PCA+SVM, were determined to be poly and Radial Basis Function, whose coefficients were 0.03 and 0.01, respectively. With individual identification tests carried out on 10 pigs respectively, the identification accuracy was increased to 88.85% from 83.66% by the improved scheme, also the training time as well as testing time were reduced to 30.1% and 20.97% of the original value in the earlier scheme, respectively. It indicates that PCA pre-treatment had a positive effect on improving the efficiency of individual pig identification with SVM. It provides experimental support for the mobile terminals and embedded application of SVM classifiers.

121-130

Authors: Viktor TROKHANIAK, Nadia SPODYNIUK, Taras LENDIEL, Petro LUZAN, Anatolii MISHCHENKO, Svitlana TARASENKO, Lucretia POPA, Claudia IONITA

One of the main factors in the poultry house is maintaining a standardized microclimate. The quality of the product output in the final result depends precisely on the quality indicators of the air parameters. Poultry during its maintenance requires significant efforts and technological solutions. In this regard, authors improved microclimate system in air environment of the poultry house by installing exhaust fans on the side wall in a total number of 8 units. CFD modeling using ANSYS Fluent is a powerful tool for predicting the air flow scheme in a poultry house and is considered an alternative to experimental studies. Based on the obtained results of CFD modeling, it was established that the valves located at a height of 330 mm from the ceiling work most efficiently. Pressure drop for the inlet valves is 45.85 Pa. Air velocity at the inlet of the supply valves is equal to 9.17 m/s. Air velocity at a height of 0.7 m from the floor level varies within 0.57 m/s, the temperature is 9.91 °С.

145-158

Authors: Yuan FU, Shiyi REN, Peng TANG, Yuancai LENG, Xiaohu CHEN, Xinye TU, Xiaorong LV

Aiming at the potato cropping pattern in the hilly area of southwest China, a small digging device for potato harvester was designed. First, the overall structure of the harvester was determined according to the soil physical characteristic and cropping pattern of the test site. Then, the digging shovel, the key components of harvester were designed and was analyzed the relationship between the inclination of the digging shovel and the power loss under the conditions of different digging speed, digging depth and soil bulk density by MATLAB software, and the mathematical models were established. Finally, the three-dimensional model of the whole machine was established by SolidWorks, and the simulation experiment was carried out with the model of soil particles, potato particles and potato ridges created by the discrete element (DEM) software. The simulation results show that when the working speed of the harvester is 1 m/s, the digging depth is 170 mm, and the potato expose rate is 87.3%. Under normal working conditions of the digging device, appropriately reducing the digging depth can reduce the resistance and wear of the digging shovels.

170-176

Authors: Mustaqimah MUSTAQIMAH, Syafriandi SYAFRIANDI, Andriani LUBIS, Nawawi JUHAN, Diswandi NURBA

This study aims to develop a fish grater machine to produce shredded fish on a household scale. The development of this fish shredder machine considers getting the maximum capacity, a minimum percentage of losses, a maximum percentage of the samples with short grade and middle grade size, and a maximum percentage of the samples with rough grade size with limited sources specified power. The method used in this research is the machine manufacturing and testing approach. Three types of shredder machine teeth (K-type, P-type, and B-type) are the main focus of this research to optimize the quality of the shredded material and the machine's performance. The machine capacity, the percentage of losses, and the optimal quality of the counting size of the developed machine can be achieved using K-type shredder machine teeth. Analysis of variance and the t-test are used simultaneously to determine the optimal performance of this machine. The results of this study suggest that using a K-type shredder machine teeth is the most appropriate shredder machine for shredded fish.

185-194

Authors: Zongwei JIA, Yi SHAO, Yijie HOU, ChenYu ZHAO, ZhiChuan WANG, Yiming HOU, Jinpeng QIN

The automatic detection of wheat ears in the field has important scientific research value in yield estimation, gene character expression and seed screening. The manual counting method of wheat ears commonly used by breeding experts has some problems, such as low efficiency and high influence of subjective factors. In order to accurately detect the number of wheat ears in the field, based on mobilenet series network model, deep separable convolution module and alpha channel technology, the yolov4 model is reconstructed and successfully applied to the task of wheat ear yield estimation in the field. The model can adapt to the accurate recognition and counting of wheat ear images in different light, viewing angle and growth period, At the same time, the model volume with different alpha parameters is more suitable for mobile terminal deployment. The results show that the parameters of the improved yolov4 model are five times smaller than the original model, the average detection accuracy is 76.45%, and the detection speed FPS is two times higher than the original model, which provides accurate technical support for rapid yield estimation of wheat in the field.

205-214

Authors: Zengcun CHANG, Dongjie LI, Shuqi SHANG, Xiaoning HE, Baiqiang ZUO, Cheng DONG, Xu LI, Dongwei WANG

A peanut harvest separation and conveying device was designed considering the shortage of peanut harvest machinery and poor harvesting effect in China. The interaction between mechanism and pod-soil mixture was analysed to obtain the motion state of peanut relative separation conveyor. ADAMS simulation was applied to obtain the spatial curve of peanut trajectory in the separation process. The study determined that the optimum operating parameters of the separation conveyor were a drum speed of 280 r/min and an inclination angle of 19°. This study provides a theoretical basis for the further design of efficient peanut harvesting device.

225-236

Authors: Lili LI, Hua YANG, Bin WANG

Because of the high similarity of leaves of different Cerasus humilis varieties, it is difficult to identify them with the naked eye. In this study, the leaves of four different Cerasus humilis varieties collected in the field were used as the research objects, and a new leaf recognition model based on the improved lightweight convolution neural network model EfficientNet-B0 was proposed. Firstly, the performance of the network models Efficientnet-B0 and ResNet50, GoogleNet, ShuffleNet, and MobileNetV3 were compared based on two different learning methods. Then, the influence of different optimizers on model recognition accuracy was compared based on the optimal model. Finally, different learning rates were used to optimize the optimal model. The results show that the recognition rate of the proposed Efficientnet-B0 +Ranger+0.0005 model was up to 86.9%, which was 2.23% higher than that of the original Efficientnet-B0 model. The results show that this method can effectively improve the recognition accuracy of Cerasus humilis auriculate leaves, which can provide a reference for the deployment of the leaf identification model of Cerasus humilis variety on the mobile terminal.

245-259

Authors: Ye ZHANG, Qing JIANG, Liangyuan XU, Chao HUANG, Huasheng GAN

Shell-and-tube heat exchangers are widely used in many research fields and industrial production processes, but little research has been conducted on the use of heat exchangers for drying crops. This study conducted a numerical simulation of the temperature, velocity, and pressure fields based on the shell-and-tube fluids of a heat exchanger in a biomass particle hot-blast stove. The correctness of the simulation results was verified by test data before simulation, and the mesh was verified to be irrelevant. The application of a multi-objective genetic algorithm in heat exchanger design and optimization was explored, considering five design variables, such as hot tube diameter, transverse pitch, longitudinal pitch, cold flow velocity, and hot flow velocity for optimization. The Nusselt number, friction factor, and comprehensive performance coefficient were used as objective functions for 2D and 3D response surface analysis. The final design variables P1=74.91 mm, P2=104.23 mm, P3=121.37 mm, P4=4.83 m/s, and P5=8.48 m/s were obtained to improve the comprehensive performance coefficient by 16.11%. The heat transfer performance was improved by 9.55% and the resistance performance was reduced by 15%

269-284

Authors: Dewanto HARJUNOWIBOWO, Anif JAMALUDDIN, Yudi RINANTO, Fajar PRASETYA

The betel vine, a species of Piper, has organic impacts on human health through its secondary metabolites. Historically, it has been used to treat various illnesses including liver and stomach problems, inflammation, and as an antioxidant, antipyretic, and antimicrobial. Despite its medicinal benefits, the black betel vine (Piper betle var. Nigra) is not widely cultivated. This review summarises traditional and advanced methods of betel cultivation, including the habitats and diseases affecting Piper Betle L. There are two cultivation systems: closed-type and open-type, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The modern method of propagation through callus induction is gaining popularity, but requires specialised knowledge and is more costly. Traditional cultivation is less complicated, but exposes young plants to disease. Implementing smart farming practices, maintaining optimal growth conditions, and utilizing a screen house with artificial shading and lighting may lead to higher-quality crops with reduced losses. Before planting, the cuttings should be soaked in a fungicide mixture and grown as individual plants to avoid bacterial leaf blight from occurring.

295-304

Authors: Bin WANG, Lili LI, Shilin LI, Hua YANG

The key to diagnosing the types and degree of apple leaf diseases is to correctly segment apple leaf disease spots. Therefore, in order to effectively solve the problem of poor segmentation of leaves and diseased areas, the U2Net semantic segmentation network model was used in the research of apple leaf disease identification and disease diagnosis, and compared with the classic semantic segmentation network model DeepLabV3+ and UNet. In addition, the effects of different learning rates (0.01, 0.001, 0.0001) and optimizers (Adam, SGD) on the performance of U2Net network model were compared and analyzed. The experimental results showed that the learning rate is 0.001 and the optimizer is Adam, the average pixel accuracy (MPA) and mean intersection over union (MIoU) of the research model for lesion segmentation reach 98.87% and 84.43%, respectively. The results of this study were expected to provide the theoretical basis for the precise control of apple leaf disease.

315-324

Authors: Gennadii GOLUB, Oleg KEPKO, Olexander PUSHKA, Zoia KOVTUNIUK, Timofii KOTLIAR

Economic efficiency of greenhouse vegetable growing depends quite significantly on the cost of energy carriers, which is why the introduction of energy-saving technologies in greenhouse vegetable growing is an urgent issue. One of the ways to save energy resources can be the use of a closed ventilation system of the "plant greenhouse - mushroom greenhouse" type, which is based on the opposite type of respiration of plants and mushrooms. A closed ventilation system includes air exchange between the greenhouse with growing plants and the cultivation room for growing mushrooms. The closed ventilation system allows you to save energy by reducing the heating of the incoming air, as well as increasing the yield of vegetable products due to the increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air that flows from the cultivation room for mushrooms to the greenhouse and mushrooms due to the increased concentrations of oxygen in the air that flows into the cultivation room for mushrooms from the greenhouse. Mathematical modeling of the process of heat transfer between greenhouses makes it possible to simulate transitional processes between rooms in order to assess the quality and accuracy of regulation, as well as to evaluate the parameters of the object in transitional modes. Mathematical modeling of dynamic processes is the basis for the formulation of transfer functions for the automatic control system. As a result of the study, mathematical models of the temperature dynamics of the substrate of mushrooms and greenhouse vegetables were obtained due to the analytical solution of the system of differential equations. The adequacy of the solution was verified by the Runge-Kutta method and compared with experimental data. The difference between the theoretical and experimental values is not significant and amounted to -3 % for the substrate temperature and -3.2 % for the air temperature.

335-348

Authors: Tikuneh DESSYE, Woldesenbet LAIKE

The domestic rice industry of Ethiopia is constrained by low productivity, poor quality, and old processing machines. The rice production system is done by hand or with rudimentary tools, and only 2% of households have access to tractors. It takes 175 labor days to weed and 66% of the total farm operations. Rice harvesting and threshing are done manually using a serrated sickle and animal trembling respectively. Farmers are responsible for most of the pre-milling operations and store paddy for household consumption in local stores. Challenges include fragmented farm holdings, poor marketing channels, and a lack of awareness of post-harvest utilization. The prospects for rice mechanization development include improving the rice mechanization research system, training local entrepreneurs, providing repair and maintenance services, promoting custom hiring centers, local manufacturing of farm implements, organizing agricultural cooperatives, landholding, and land ownership structures, assessing foreign experience, linking importers and service providers, and encouraging investments in the rural infrastructure.

359-368

Authors: Dadang Dayat HIDAYAT, Ari RAHAYUNINGTYAS, Diang SAGITA, Maulana FURQON, Arie SUDARYANTO, Dadang GANDARA, Taufik YUDHI, Nandang JAENUDIN

In this study, a fluidized coffee roaster has been successfully designed, constructed, and tested. This prototype has a capacity of 500 grammes per batch to aid small-scale coffee shops in roasting coffee beans. This fluidized coffee roaster is easy to use, cheap and has an appropriate capacity for the small business requirements. The coffee roasting components of the machine consisted of a blower (600 watts), a heat exchanger, a jet burner, a cylindrical roasting chamber, a chaff and dust collector, and a frame. At a range of airflow of 4-6 m/sec, the average temperature increase in the furnace and roasting chamber was 26 °C and 7.8 °C per minute, respectively. Performance tests revealed that the developed fluidized coffee roaster had been able to roast Robusta and Arabica coffee to light, medium, and dark roasting levels. For Robusta coffee, the time required to achieve light, medium, and dark levels were 8.18, 9.85, and 12.03 minutes, respectively, with final roasting temperatures for each level of 209 °C, 220 °C, and 248°C. For Arabica coffee, the time required was 5.32, 7.67, and 11.72 minutes, respectively with the final roasting temperatures of 207 °C, 210 °C, and 218 °C.

379-388

Authors: Adel AL-GEZAWE, Mokhtar COTTB, Fatma ABD EL GAWAD, Mahmoud AWAD, Osama FOUDA, Mahmoud OKASHA

Fruit branch pruning is still done manually, resulting in high labor costs, ergonomic hazards, and low efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, there are some limitations with imported agricultural machines because of their high prices and inappropriate local conditions. Hence, the present study aims to manufacture a local device for fruit branch pruning based on validating the correct stem-cutting position using a branch guide. The manufactured device comprises a 60 W electric motor, a formed base, a teethed pruning disc, a telescopic tube made up of the picker-cutting mechanism of the device, and a 12–Volt rechargeable dry battery. The device was made from local and light materials to allow a telescopic tube to reach the high position of the citrus fruit branches and consider ergonomic aspects. Field trials were executed on sour oranges trees to assess the pruning device’s performance as a function of change in cutting disc speeds (9.81, 13.74, 17.66, and 21.59 m/s), cutting disc teeth numbers (60, 80, and 100 teeth), different groups of branches diameters {A (from 5 mm to less than 10 mm), B (10 mm to less than 20 mm), C (from 20 mm to less than 30 mm) and D (from 30 mm to less than 40 mm)}. The manufactured device was assessed in terms of device productivity, pruning efficiency, pruning damage, power requirements, specific energy, and operating cost. The results indicated that the highest device productivity and pruning efficiency were 780, 218, 100 and 65 branch/h; and 96.0, 94.0, 92.0 and 90.5%, while the lowest pruning branch damage were 4.0, 6.0, 8.0 and 9.5%, specific energy were 0.0447, 0.1645, 0.4050 and 0.700 Wh per branch, for the groups of branches diameters A, B, C, and D respectively. The current investigation recommended that the optimal operational conditions were using the manufactured device for pruning citrus trees at 17.66 m/s pruning disc speed with a pruning disc teeth number of 60 teeth.

399-408

Authors: Min FU, Xiaoqing CHEN, Zefei GAO, Chengmeng WANG, Bing XU, Yilin HAO

For the problem of lacking reliable parameters during simulation analysis of the crushed corn stalk (CCS) micro-comminution process with gas-solid coupling method, the simulation parameters are calibrated using a combination of physical measurements and virtual experiments with CCS as the research object. The intrinsic parameters of CCS are obtained by physical experiment, and the stacking test is carried out by cylinder lifting method, and the actual angle of repose(AoR) is obtained as 44.12° by fitting the boundary line with Matlab software; the discrete element model of CCS is established, and the virtual stacking test is carried out by EDEM software; CCS-CCS dynamic friction coefficient, CCS-CCS static friction coefficient and JKR (JohnsonKendall-Roberts) surface energy are identified as the parameters with significant effects on the AoR by Plackett-Burman test; the steepest climb test is leveraged to determine the center of response surface analysis; the quadratic polynomial regression model of the simulation parameters and the AoR is established by the Box-Behnken test using the AoR as the evaluation index, and the optimal combination of the significant parameters are obtained as follows: the CCS-CCS dynamic friction coefficient is 0.14, the CCS-CCS static friction coefficient is 0.55, and the JKR surface energy is 0.12; the AoR verification test is conducted based on the optimal combination of the significant parameters. The results show that the AoR of the CCS is 43.82°, which is 0.68% of the actual AoR, indicating that the parameter combination is reliable. The data obtained in this research can provide corresponding simulation parameters for CCS discrete element simulation and the development of straw micro-crushing equipment.

417-426

Authors: Irfan ARDIANSAH, Ryan Ganesha CALIBRA, Nurpilihan BAFDAL, Awang BONO, Edy SURYADI, Siti NURHASANAH

Because hydroponic plant nutrient is dissolved in the water, water quality management is essential for growing healthy plants. Taking care of the total dissolved solids (TDS) and the pH (water acidity) is essential. The purpose of this research is to create a IoT-based water quality monitoring device. The average TDS after 30 days of automation with an Arduino UNO was 1162.82 ppm, and the gadget kicked on the nutrient pump whenever the TDS fell below 1000 ppm or the EC fell below 2. The mechanism self-adjusts the pH when it falls below 5.5 or rises above 6.5, with a mean of 6.17.

437-448

Authors: Shuchang LU, Xiawen LI

Dry direct seeding cultivation technology of rice is an important aspect of rice production and management. Six treatments were designed in this paper, and that is, T1 (conventional irrigation), T2 (conventional irrigation + conditioner), T3 (30% water-saving irrigation), T4 (30% water-saving irrigation + conditioner), T5 (50% water-saving irrigation), T6 (50% water-saving irrigation + conditioner). The results showed that in the three separate irrigation treatments, 30% water-saving irrigation was conducive to the growth of dry direct seeding rice at the tillering stage, jointing and booting stage, and 50% water-saving irrigation was more conducive to the growth of rice at grain filling stage. Compared with no application of amendments, all kinds of treatments could significantly promote the growth of dry direct seeding rice. Under the condition of water-saving irrigation of 30%, higher dry matter quality, yield and nutrient absorption can be obtained. The total dry matter quality and rice yield of T4 treatment with 30% water-saving irrigation and conditioner were the highest, which were 99.90 g/pot and 37.76 g/pot respectively, compared with conventional treatment (T1) was 37.60% and 45.96% higher, and this treatment had obvious effect on nitrogen and potassium absorption. In terms of quality impact, water saving was 30% Irrigation conditions are conducive to the improvement of rice processing quality, appearance quality and nutritional quality, especially after the application of conditioner, the overall rice quality is improved. This study has a certain reference value for water-saving irrigation, promoting nutrient utilization, stable yield and high quality of dry direct seeding rice.

461-470

Authors: Huabiao LI, Qihuan WANG, Jie MA, Yanan WANG, Dong YUE, Duanyang GENG

In order to solve the problem of high broken rate and impurity rate in the direct harvesting of corn kernels in China, a flexible threshing element with variable stiffness consisting of a conical spring and rasp bar was developed on the basis of the existing horizontal axial-flow flow corn threshing cylinder structure to achieve low loss harvesting of corn kernels. Through mechanical analysis of the key components of the threshing element, its structure and operating parameters were determined. Then, orthogonal tests were carried out using the feed amount, threshing clearance and cylinder speed as the test factors, and the broken rate and impurity rate of the corn kernels as the test indicators. The results showed that the feed amount, threshing clearance and cylinder speed had a significant effect on the broken rate and impurity rate of corn kernels; the optimum parameters for the corn variable stiffness flexible threshing device were feed amount 6.1 kg•s−1, threshing clearance 40 mm and cylinder speed 392 r•min−1. The broken rate of corn kernels was 1.67% and impurity rate 1.03%. The test results fully met the requirements of the national standards for corn harvesting operations. This study provides a technical basis for the application of the axial flow corn flexible threshing device in the corn direct harvesting combine.

481-491

Authors: Haihua JING, Jing ZHANG, Kebao DONG, Jiaqi MA, Zexu JIN

Water scarcity has been a critical constraint to economic development in semi-arid areas of China, so optimizing irrigation scheduling has become essential. This study obtained quantitative relationships between crop yield, crop water consumption, and irrigation quantity based on the Hydrus-2D and Stewart models. Different irrigation scheduling scenarios were evaluated to obtain the best irrigation scheduling based on the principle of simultaneous water conservation and crop productivity improvement with the evaluation indicators of crop yield, water use efficiency (WUE), irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE), and Critic-Topsis method. Taking drip irrigation under mulch as an example, the problem of optimizing the irrigation scheduling for different typical years was calculated. The optimization results showed that in the wet, normal, dry, and very dry years the annual irrigation quantity should be 49.68 mm, 49.68 mm, 85.38 mm, and 123.72 mm, when the WUE as well as IWUE, increases significantly, which had less impact on the crop yield and can save irrigation quantity by 30.00%, 30.00%, 35.00%, 27.00%. This study used Hydrus-2D to make a new attempt in irrigation scheduling optimization, giving full play to the model's high accuracy in soil water transport simulation and flexibility in boundary condition simulation. The optimization results can provide a reference for achieving accurate control of irrigation quantity during the crop growth period and reasonable irrigation scheduling formulation for regional crops.

501-510

Authors: Hui LI, Xin YANG, Aiqian YANG

The spring finger collection mechanism is a core component of balers. It is usually used to collect soft straw crops (corn straw, wheat straw, green forage), and rarely used for hard stem crops (such as branch pruning residues). Due to different biophysical characteristics of hard stem crops and soft straw crops, the collection mechanisms are also different. In China, branch pruning residues in apple orchards are collected manually. It is a heavy labor task. To this end, this article uses an improved spring finger mechanism to collect pruning residues in apple orchard branches, effectively replacing manual collection operations. A dynamic motion trajectory simulation platform is developed by analyzing each action using pitchforks or other agricultural tools throughout the entire collection process, and combined with the structure of the spring finger collection mechanism. The platform of the spring finger collection mechanism is improved to collect orchard branches, and redesign and manufacture the core components of the collection mechanism. In addition, comparative tests were performed on4 different placement orientation sunder the conditions of R=40±2 r/min and V=0.9-1.1 m/s. That is, 1) messy, 2) transverse, 3) portrait orientation (the treetop firstly contacts the collection device), and 4) portrait orientation (the thick stems of the branches first touch the collection device). The results indicate that 1) and 2) have similar success rates in picking branches, while 3) and 4) have lower success rates, especially with 4) being the lowest). The analysis found that some branches were directly inserted into the spring finger gap and moved under the machine, resulting in a large amount of losses. This study aims to improve the success rate of picking branches in the bundling machine and verify the relationship between different placement directions and the success rate of picking branches.

520-526

Authors: Dragoș MANEA, Gheorghe STROESCU, Lucreţia POPA, Alexandru IONESCU, Alexandru ZAICA

This paper presents the results obtained by INMA Bucharest, following a research project, in which a technology for harvesting and storing industrial hemp was developed. The equipment for harvesting green hemp stalks intended for this technology was tested in an experimental plot grown with Dacia - Secuieni hemp. Operating indices (actual torque at the power take-off, traction force at drawbar, total effective power to operate the equipment, working speed, effective working capacity) and working qualitative indices (stalk cutting height at lower knife and upper knife, degree of stalk cutting, stalk diameter, the average length of the stalk cut without inflorescence). As a result of the analysis of the values obtained for the operating indices and qualitative working indices, a series of pertinent conclusions and observations resulted, which will help guide harvesting and storage practices to ensure quality requirements for hemp fibre production are met.

537-548

Authors: Weipeng ZHANG, Bo ZHAO, Guangrui LI, Liming ZHOU, Kang NIU, Shengbo GAO

In response to the seasonal surge in the number of agricultural machinery failures in the service area caused by cross regional operations of agricultural machinery, agricultural machinery and equipment manufacturing enterprises have established emergency service networks to compensate for the insufficient service capacity of service providers. This paper proposes a method for locating and allocating emergency service vehicles based on a set coverage model, which aims to minimize the total cost of vehicle scheduling schemes and comprehensively consider the service scope and service capabilities of emergency service vehicles. An improved genetic algorithm is designed to solve the emergency service vehicle configuration problem, determine the scheduling location and number of emergency service vehicles, and verify its effectiveness through practical cases. Provide effective guarantee for agricultural machinery maintenance services for agricultural machinery enterprises in the cluster operation process, and improve the efficiency of maintenance services.

559-568

Authors: Changxi LIU, Jun HU, Yufei LI, Wei ZHANG, Qingda LI

Conical wind field anti-drift spray is an innovative form of anti-drift operation using auxiliary air flow, which can resist the generation of vortex, and has the characteristics of reducing the droplets loss with wind at the vertical height. In order to explore the characteristics of spray flow field and droplet deposition performance under conical wind field, the structure and working principle were analyzed based on the basic principle of proton dynamics. Spraytec and PDPA system were used to explore the distribution characteristics of spray flow field. Box-Behnken experimental design was used to analyze the droplet deposition performance. The optimum combination of the working parameters with spray height is 0.46 m, the spray pressure was 0.34 MPa, the conical wind speed was 16.16 m/s, and the droplet deposition amount was 3.39µL·cm-2. The droplet deposition amount was optimal.

579-588

Authors: Lili SUN, Yaoyu LI, Yuzhi WANG, Weijie SHI, Wuping ZHANG, Xiaoying ZHANG, Huamin ZHAO, Fuzhong LI

As one of the ancient cultivated crops in China, millet has the characteristics of high nutritional value, drought resistance and barrenness. It also plays an important role in ensuring the supply of food in our country. At present, most of the millet breeding work uses manual extraction of phenotypic information, which is labor-intensive and inefficient. Therefore, the development of an automated, efficient and accurate millet phenotype detection method has practical significance for the extraction of the millet genome. In this study, a combination of sparse reconstruction based on Structure from Motion (SfM) and Patch-based Multi-View Stereo (PMVS) was used to select three different varieties of millet. A total of 81 samples of 9 samples in each period were reconstructed to obtain a 3D model of millet. The combination of conditional filtering and statistical filtering is used to remove the noise points generated during the photographing process, and finally the obtained point cloud data is used to measure the agronomic traits of millet such as plant height and leaf area. The results show that the interval angle of 5° is the best reconstruction angle of millet. The coefficient of determination R2 of point cloud measurement results and manual measurement data regression analysis is higher than 0.94, indicating that the method used for 3D reconstruction has high applicability to different millet in different periods and high-throughput measurement of millet by the method in this paper is feasible. This study provides a theoretical basis for a millet phenotypic information measurement device.

597-608

Authors: Iulian UTA, Valentin APOSTOL, Horatiu POP, Viorel BADESCU, Constantin PAVEL, Claudia IONITA

In this paper the evaporator from the air handling units (AHU) is being studied, this being connected to an air conditioning installation with mechanical compression of vapors, existing within the Thermodynamics department. In a previous analysis, the heat exchanger (HEX) was checked to see if it complied with the cooling capacity relative to the heat exchange surface by finding the specific criteria equations. A follow-up to the previous article is to calculate based on the thermodynamic cycle, what happens if the refrigerant is replaced with other new refrigerants in the field of air conditioning in order to improve the performance of the air conditioning system (ACS), finding the refrigerant with a low Global warming potential (GWP) and with an appropriate flammability class. The moisture content of seeds is one of the most important storage parameters affecting their quality. In order to obtain the desired effect, the temperature and humidity of the air must be maintained in the warehouse with an air treatment unit. In this study, it is desired to replace the refrigerant and preserve the refrigerating power from the evaporator, by changing the degree of sub-cooling from the condenser. Due to the fact that the temperature in the ambient environment changes substantially during a calendar year and the condenser of the air conditioning installation has the same configuration, thus the decrease in the ambient temperature will result in the appearance of the sub-cooling process and an increase in the performance of the installation.

617-625

Authors: Hongbin BAI, Xuying LI, Fandi ZENG, Qiang SU, Ji CUI, Junyue WANG, Yongzhi ZHANG

To accurately simulate the interactions between the plug seedlings and the planter during the planting process and explore the damage mechanism of the plug seedling substrate block, the bonding parameters of plug seedlings substrate block were calibrated by the discrete element method. The physical puncture test showed that the average of maximum force of the cone indenter on substrate block measured by texture analyzer was 4.633 N. A Hertz-Mindlin with the bonding model was established for the substrate block in EDEM software. A virtual calibration experiment was designed with the puncture force of substrate block as the evaluation index. The two-level factorial test and the steepest climbing test were used to screen out the significant parameters and the optimal interval. Then, the Box-Behnken test and the optimization solution were used to obtain the optimal bonding parameter combination of the substrate block particles. Finally, the optimal parameter combination was simulated and verified. The relative error of the maximum puncture force between the simulated value and the measured value was 1.88 %, which indicated that the bonding parameters of the substrate block obtained by calibration were accurate and reliable.

635-644

Authors: Yuanyuan SUN, Xuchang WANG, Kaixing ZHANG

Aiming at the problems of low precision, strong subjectivity, and continuous measurement in the current measurement methods of corn phenotypic traits, a method of measuring corn phenotypic traits with high precision, low cost, easy carrying and continuous measurement was proposed. Firstly, the three-dimensional scanning device Kinect 2.0 is used to collect corn information and process and reconstruct the collected point cloud. Then, the stem and leaf point clouds were segmented by straight-through filtering, ellipse fitting and region growth segmentation. Finally, the phenotypic parameters of corn were obtained by triangulation and plane fitting for the segmented corn leaves, and the accuracy was analyzed. The results showed that the accuracy of corn plant height was 97.622 %, the average relative error of stem long axis was 9.46 %, the average relative error of stem short axis was 11.17 %, and the accuracy of leaf area was 95.577 %. Studies have shown that this method provides a new method for continuous measurement of phenotypic traits in corn.

655-664

Authors: Haichao WANG, Zheying ZONG, Yi QIN, Yingjie DU, Zhen WANG, Chunhui ZHANG

Tree whitewash has the functions of parasite prevention and cold protection and is therefore commonly used in the maintenance and management of trees. At present, tree whitewash mainly relies on manual operation, which has the problems of low efficiency, poor quality, and uneven distribution of the whitewash agent. To address this issue, this study developed a smart tree whitewash device based on human–computer interaction. The device was controlled mainly by a programmable logic controller (PLC). Once the trunk information collected by sensors was received by the PLC, it would control the up and down motions of the ball screw to manipulate the mechanical arm for whitewash. In addition, a Mitsubishi GT12 touch screen was adopted to facilitate system operation. Subsequently, a whitewash experiment was performed on poplar trunks with lengths of 10–35 cm using three different whitewash devices, i.e., a backpack sprayer, a semi-automatic tree sprayer, and the proposed smart tree whitewash device; the efficiency and the amount of whitewash agents used were compared. The results suggested that as the tree diameter at breast height increased, the amount of required whitewash agent elevated accordingly. In this case, the time required by the backpack sprayer and the semiautomatic tree sprayer to complete the job both increased, whereas that required by the smart tree whitewash device remained almost identical. In terms of work efficiency, the time required by the smart whitewash device to whitewash a tree was 109.89 s, which was approximately 1/2 of the time required by the backpack sprayer or 2/3 of that required by the semiautomatic tree spraying device. Meanwhile, the amount of whitewash agent required by the smart whitewash device to whitewash a tree was 140.23 g, which was approximately 0.46 of the amount required by the backpack sprayer or 0.74 of that required by the semiautomatic tree spraying device. Therefore, it was concluded that the proposed smart tree whitewash device could not only improve the work efficiency of tree whitewash but also greatly reduce the amount of whitewash agent required, thereby decreasing the cost and minimising environmental pollution. This study provides theoretical guidance and technical support for future research on smart tree whitewash devices.

673-680

Authors: Xin DU, Cailing LIU, Changqing LIU, Meng JIANG, Hao YUAN

Currently, maize production in China suffers from many problems, such as excessive fertilizer application, inefficient fertilizer use, and insufficient agricultural labour. The effect of one-time mechanical point-applied fertilization of controlled-release compound fertilizer in the root-zone on yield and nutrient uptake was investigated to explore efficient fertilization patterns for fertilizer decrease and yield increase in maize. The selected fertilizer was a controlled-release granular fertilizer (24-6-10 for N-P2O5-K2O) with six treatments in the application program: 1) no fertilizer (CK); 2) application of a one-time banding fertilizer (BDP) 5 cm off the seeds between rows and 10 cm deep; 3) application of a one-time point-applied fertilization (RZF) 5 cm off seed in the row and 10 cm deep; 4) application of a one-time point-applied fertilization (90% RZF) 10% fertilizer reduction 5 cm off seed in the row and 10 cm deep; 5) application of a one-time point-applied fertilization (80% RZF) 20% fertilizer reduction 5 cm off seed in the row and 10 cm deep; 6) application of a one-time point-applied fertilization (70% RZF) 30% fertilizer reduction 5 cm off seed in the row and 10 cm deep. The results showed that RZF increased yield by 5.84% over BDP, and the difference was significant, indicating that mechanized point-applied fertilization of fertilizer can replace manual point-applied fertilization application operations and achieve increased crop yield. The agronomic utilization rate of fertilizer of 12.35% and the bias productivity of 5.31% were higher in RZF than in BDP, and the differences were significant, indicating that one-time mechanical point-applied fertilization in the root zone significantly improved fertilizer utilization and reduced fertilizer loss.