Design and Construction of a High Speed Inter-Row Cultivator

Abstract

In many parts of the world, row crops are treated with herbicides. Because of environmental concerns, crop cultivation is suggested as an excellent method of weed control. The object of this study was to design and construct a high speed inter-row cultivator. The speed of plowing has a significant effect not only on the depth of plowing but on factors which affect the quality of soil preparation such as loosening of the upper soil layer, cutting roots of the previous crops, covering and plowing in of weeds, leveling the finished surface of the field, displacement of the son layer and so on. In this study, the designed and constructed cultivator has a toolbar, unit frame, disk coulter and a flat sweep. The unit frame is attached to a tractor mounted tool bar by a suspension linkage. The suspension linkage allows the unit frame to move up and down relative to a tool bar that the cultivator unit is attached to. The numerical analysis was performed with COSMOS/M 1.71 FEM software (Structural Research and Analysis Corporation, CA).