DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF STEPLESS ADJUSTABLE SOWING AMOUNT HOLE-TYPE METERING WHEEL FOR RICE

Abstract

The performance of hole-type metering device influenced the adaption of different rice varieties in the mechanical direct hill-drop seeding technology, and the stepless adjustable sowing amount hole-type metering wheel was designed to solve this problem. The mechanical characteristics of different seeds were analyzed to acquire the parameters including hole diameter, depth, number, diameter of metering wheel and jogger slider mechanism, and the performance of metering wheel was tested on JPS-12 experimental bench by using Yongyou 12, Huanghuazhan and Wanxiang youhuazhan varieties. The hole depth and rotating speeds of metering wheel were the independence variance, the average seed numbers per hole, the coefficient of variance and the cavity rate were taken as the evaluation indexes. The results showed that the metering wheel could sow 3.58~7.82 seeds per hole with less than 40% of the coefficient of variance in average seeds number per hole and less than 5% of the cavity rate, and the regression model of average seed numbers per hole was built by employing the length of seeds, the rotating speed of metering wheel and the hole depth. The correlation coefficient was 0.952, the prediction error of regression mode was 0.32~11.35% by the field experiment. This study could be used for designing the hole-type metering device for rice.