摘要
Most of the commercially-available pot seedling nursery machines are incompatible with soft-pot-trays and are labor-intensive and low in productivity.A soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system was developed in this study to achieve automatic embedding of the soft pot tray into the hard tray following sowing and covering with soil.A control system was constructed using the Arduino program development environment.An embedded-hard-tray automatic lowering mechanism and conveyor-belt-based pot-tray embedding system were designed.Dynamics analysis was conducted to derive an equation to describe the embedding process of the soft pot tray into the embedded hard tray.A prototype of the soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system was manufactured and tested.The analytical equation suggested that a minimum linear velocity of 0.86 m/s was required for a complete embedding process.The experimental results showed that the embedded-hard-tray automatic lowering mechanism was reliable and stable as the tray placement success rate was greater than 99%.The successful tray embedding rate was 100%and the seed exposure rate was less than 1%with a linear velocity of the conveyor belt of 0.92 m/s.The experiment findings agreed well with the analytical results.The proposed soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system satisfied the technical specifications for a light-economical pot seedling nursery machine.
基金
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China(Grant No.2018YFD0700703)
National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.51675188)
and the Earmarked Fund for Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System(Grant No.CARS-01-43).
