Design and experiments of buds-injury-prevention system based on induction-counting in sugarcane-seeds cutting

Abstract: At present, all of the sugarcane planting machines are not equipped with buds-injury-prevention mechanism and all of the machines have the problem of high injury rates of buds. In order to solve this problem, a buds-injury-prevention system based on induction-counting in sugarcane-seeds cutting was designed, which not only could detect and count the buds that were located at the sugarcanes with different diameters to make the planter meet the planting requirements, but also could ensure the integrity of buds to improve the yield of sugarcane. In this system, we had designed a resistive induction-counting mechanism which was used to convert the signal of protuberant sugarcane buds into electrical signal in the process of conveying the sugarcane seed. The electrical signal would be input into the voltage comparator to compare with the reference voltage after it was amplified by amplifying circuit. According to the result of comparison, the comparator would output a signal of high level or low level which would be input into MCU (micro control unit) to implement the counting operation of buds. Every sugarcane seed should contain 2 buds according to the agronomic requirements. When the count reached 2, the MCU would send out a control signal to trigger the relay to force the hydraulic pump to supply the hydraulic cylinder with oil by controlling the electromagnetic valve. For the cylinder was fixed, the piston would move down to push the cutter to cut off two-bud sugarcane-seed, and then the function of buds-injury-prevention could be achieved. When the cutting was completed, the piston would force the cutter to return quickly. Meanwhile, the MCU would reset the counter, and the system would get into the next circle of counting and cutting automatically. In order to optimize the performance of the system, the integrity of sugarcane seeds and buds should be the prerequisite. Having a force analysis and a buds-injury-prevention analysis on the cutting process of the system, the optimal installation distance between induction-counting mechanism and cutter could be determined, which could make sure that the cutter had completely avoided the buds when the counting was meeting the requirement. Then the buds-injury-prevention function during the cutting could be achieved. In order to verify the buds-counting and buds-injury-prevention performance of this system, the physical prototype of the system was manufactured. When conducting the test, the reference voltage should be set reasonably. Through a lot of experiments, the system could achieve high precision when the reference voltage was 2.9 V. In addition, to illustrate whether the buds-injury-prevention performance of the system is good or bad, a set of comparative tests needed to be designed. And the comparative test machine was 2CZ-2 multi-functional sugarcane planter from Nanning Wuling Guihua Vehicle Company, which was not installed with buds-injury-prevention system. The test results showed that the accuracy rate of buds counting of the system was 98.87%, while the average rate of the injury buds was 1.57% that was 6.3% lower than the 2Cz-2 sugarcane planter, which showed that the system's buds-injury-prevention performance was remarkable. The results can meet the design requirements and the research can provide a reference for the design of sugarcane planting machinery.