Development of Adaptive Seed-Separation Trier for Small-Seeded Crops

Abstract

The STAR-CCM+ software package was used to create a model of the process of separating seed material from small-seeded crops on a cylindrical cellular trier. By taking into account the physic-mechanical properties of mustard seeds and the given initial and boundary conditions of the trier, a visualization of the separation process was obtained, which depended on several factors, including the number of seeds and impurities in the seed mixture, the rotation frequency of the trier cylinder, and the diameter of the trier cylinder. The numerical simulation of the process at a variable rotation frequency resulted in obtaining a relationship between the number of seeds and impurities, the relative content of impurity elements in the seed mixture in the tray, and the conditional performance of the separator, depending on the duration of cylinder rotation counterclockwise and clockwise. Based on the obtained dependencies of the numerical modeling and the results of the improvement of the TracTrac software package, a laboratory sample of an adaptive cylindrical cell trier was developed. This trier allows real-time, based on the received video image, to determine the trajectory of the seed flight and to control the position of the tray and the rotation frequency of the cylinder using Arduino UNO.