Design and Development of an Universal Vacuum Disc Equipped with Hole Adaptors for Precision Seeders

Abstract

The objective of this study was to designand develop a vacuum disk equipped with hole adaptors for precision seeding ofdifferent crop seeds. In order to meet this objective, a vacuum plate with apitch diameter of 190 mm and with 36 holes, each in the diameter of 8 mm wasdesigned and manufactured. What makesthe disk for using different crops was the idea of adjusting hole diameter withdifferent adaptors at different diameters that makes them suitable for seeding differentcrop seeds. If necessary some of the holes can be plugged and the number ofholes on vacuum plate can be reduced proportionally down to 18, 12 holes etc. Thiswould provide another option to the farmers in order to set the theoreticalseed spacing along with a change in transmission ratio via gear box availablein precision seeders. The adaptors designed in a special software wasmanufactured on a 3D printer at a hole diameter of 2.5 and 4.0 mm in order touse for seeding cotton and corn seeds, respectively. The adaptors were then pluggedon 8 mm holes and tested in the laboratory conditions by using sticky belt teststand. Seed spacing values were measured by a computerized measurement system(CMS) for the cotton and corn seeds. These tests were conducted in order tofind out how the use of adaptor materials as coupled with the steel vacuumplate thus changing the coefficient of friction will affect the performance. Thetheoretical seed spacing for both cotton and corn seeds was set to 11.8 cm anda vacuum of 6.0 kPa was applied during the tests. The forward speed values wereselected to be 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 m s-1. Quality of feed, multiple andmiss indices as well as coefficient of precision (CP3), Precision and Ermswere considered as the performance indicators for precision seeding. The quality of feed index for cotton seeds was found to be 84.4 and88.9% while the miss index contributed to the rest of the seed spacingdistribution of 15.6 and 11.1 % at forward speeds of 0.5 and 1.5 ms-1,respectively. The quality of feed index for cotton was obtained to be 100% at aforward speed of 1.0 ms-1. The quality of feed index for corn seedswas found to be 100% at all forward speeds considered in the study.

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