Abstract:
Abstract: In the rice area of the Northeast China, the large amount of rice straw with low moisture content is tough to chop. However, the existing method of chopping combined auxiliary slitting could not meet the requirements of chopping under such condition, which could cause some problems such as incomplete straw crushing and unqualified rate of straw crushing. It would affect the subsequent land preparation and transplanting operations and caused problems such as machine blocking, straw floating before transplanting and seedling floating during transplanting. In order to solve these problems, this paper designed a straw chopper based on the principle of differential sawing, which could realize the same direction with different speed between the saw disc blade and the crushing knife to achieve supporting sawing. The friction force and relative linear velocity of crushing straw were increased to improve the crushing effect. Structural parameters of saw disc blade, crushing knife and other key components were designed through theoretical analysis, and the structure and operating parameters of the machine were preliminarily obtained. In order to improve the wind velocity and straw feeding performance of the crushing chamber, three kinds of fan blade forms, namely facade fan blade, reverse fan blade and diverse fan blade, were designed to compare with no fan blade through simulation analysis. Simulation results by Fluent showed that the facade fan blade could improve the wind velocity in the crushing chamber and contributed to improving straw fluidity, and the verification test was in accordance with the simulation results. According to the movement track of crushing knife and saw disc blade, the rotation speeds of them were designed. The rotation speed of crushing knife ranged from 1815 to 2475 r/min, accordingly, and the saw disc blade rotation speed ranged from 605 to 825 r/min, to be specific, the ratio of rotation speed between saw disc blade and crushing knife was 1/3 constantly. The dynamics analysis of straw crushing process showed that rotation speed of crushing knife and the tilt angle between the saw disc blade could affect crushing performance. Therefore, a field experiment of two factors with three levels was designed by using the average length of straw crushing and the crushing qualification rate as an evaluation index. The test results showed that the crushing knife rotation speed and angle of slope had a significant impact on average length of straw crushing and straw crushing qualification rate. Considering straw crushing performance and energy consumption, the optimal combination was determined as follows: The crushing knife rotation speed was 1800 r/min and the angle of slope was 65°, the corresponding saw disc blade rotation speed was 600 r/min. The field test results under the optimized combination conditions were as follows: the average length of straw crushing was 9.58 cm, the proportion of straw under 10 cm was 93.23%, and the scatter unevenness was 20.89%, which met the quality requirements of straw crushing and scattering in the northeast rice region. In the paper, a comparison test between the differential sawing rice straw chopper and the ordinary straw chopper was carried out. The filed test showed that the average length of straw crushing of the ordinary straw chopper was 13.42 cm, and the proportion of straw under 10 cm was 71.5%, which was not as good as the differential sawing rice straw chopper, and there was no obvious difference in the scatter unevenness between them. After the chopping operation, the same plow was used for the plowing operation, and the straw burying rate was 98.92% of the differential sawing rice straw chopper while the ordinary straw chopper was 90.21 %. Its successful implementation could greatly improve the operation effect for chopping rice straw and stubble on one hand, and on the other hand provided better growing surface conditions for rice. The design of the machine provided a basis for the popularization and application of straw mulching technology in northeast China.