Study of the spring suspension mechanism of the coulter of the sod seeder

Abstract

One of the promising technologies for restoring degraded forage lands that meets the requirements of organic farming is direct strip sowing of grass seeds into the sod with mechanical cultivation of strips of soil, the width of which ensures the successful development of seedlings without the use of herbicides. To improve the quality of seeding of sod seeders, a modernized design of the coulter group has been proposed with a shoe opener mounted on a parallelogram suspension mechanism in the form of torsion springs, characterized by their vertical placement on the seeder frame (RF patent No. 2772128). To study the influence of the design and technological parameters of the coulter group based on the spring suspension mechanism on the time the mechanical system returns to the condition of dynamic balance, a laboratory installation was developed. It includes a set of measuring and recording equipment based on the multifunctional sensor WitMotion WT901WIFI MPU9250. In the process of the research, a second-order Box-Benkin experiment plan for three factors was implemented, which made it possible to determine the dependence of the damping time of oscillations of the suspension mechanism of the coulter group on the following system parameters: depth of furrow formation, length of the leashes of the suspension mechanism and mass of the shoe opener. For the selected geometrical parameters of the experimental sample of the coulter group and the established equivalent stiffness of the torsion springs, equal to 240 N‧m/rad, the range of minimum values of the transition period time is within 0.212…0.218 s and corresponds to the furrow formation depth 41.3…50.0 mm, the length of the leashes 0.13 m, the weight of the coulter 1.7...1.8 kg. The trajectory of the shoe opener during the transition process in most experiments corresponds to a damped oscillatory motion, in some cases represents an extremely aperiodic motion.

Keywords

• direct sowing in the sod
• disc milling cutter
• coulter group
• torsion spring
• shoe opener