Design and test of automatic detection platform for soil fragmentation rate in rotary tillage

Abstract

As an important index of soil crushing performance of rotary tiller, the soil fragmentation rate is still limited to manual measurement. In this study, an automatic detection platform for soil fragmentation rate was designed, which integrated soil intake, screening, weighing and calculation of soil fragmentation rate. This platform can solve the problem that the index of the soil fragmentation rate cannot be detected quickly and effectively after rotary tillage, which leads to difficulty in field quality evaluation. The platform was mainly composed of a shovel soil module, conveying module, screening module, weighing module and automatic control system, which could realize single-line and multi-point automatic soil fragmentation rate detection. Based on the homogeneous dry slope model, the tilting angles of soil intake and soil feeding after rotary tillage on the platform were determined to be 30.10° and 26.67°, respectively. According to the principle of flow conservation, a rotary circulation screening module was designed to obtain soil particle size grading. A method based on the principle of multi-line and multi-point measurement was developed to detect soil fragmentation rate. The influence of screening speed on screening effect was analyzed, and the reasonable value of screening speed was determined to be 0.5 m/s. A field performance test was carried out in October 2019 to verify the detection performance of the platform. The results showed that, compared with the manual test method, the maximum test error was no more than 11%, the minimum test error was less than 4%, the maximum single test time was no more than 2 min, and the total test time of each test area was no more than 30 min. The efficiency of single-point detection was significantly better than the manual detection, which indicated that the design in this study met the requirements of rapid detection of soil fragmentation rate, and provided a new idea for the automatic detection of quality of rotary tillage.

Tillage depth regulation system via depth measurement feedback and composite sliding mode control: A field comparison validation study

“…8 Conventional tillage depth measurement techniques involve the selection of sample points in the field and excavating the soil for measurement using instruments such as tillage depth gages, a process which is labor-intensive, inefficient, and lacks continuous measurement capabilities. 7,9 Over recent years, many scholars have conducted comprehensive research into real-time tillage depth measurement methodologies. [10][11][12][13][14] For instance, Lou et al employed the propagation time interval of ultrasonic sensor signals to compute the distance between the implement and the ground, thus facilitating tillage depth measurement.…”

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the furrow shape in orchards using a low-cost lidar

“…Zhang et al (2021) designed the mechanical structure of the equipment and then used the inclination sensor to build a control system to realize the automatic adjustment of the ditching depth of the double-row ditching fertilizer machine in orchards. Du et al (2019) built a tillage depth measurement model with an error compensation coefficient based on the analysis of the influence of structural deformation and wheel sag on the measurement accuracy of the hanging rototiller set, which improved the measurement accuracy of the system. In our previous study, ultrasonic sensors were used to monitor the depth of ditching, and a wavelet denoising and Kalman filtering algorithm was proposed to reduce the noise of the ditching depth data, which improved the reliability of the data (Zhou et al, 2021(Zhou et al, , 2022(Zhou et al, , 2023a.…”