Test on harvest performance of cotton picking head with rubber-bar roller

Abstract: Xinjiang is the largest production base of commodity cotton in China, and cotton is the main economic industry in Xinjiang. Cotton-picker in the commercial market is mainly horizontal spindle cotton-picker, and its characteristics are high net harvest rate and low impurity rate. The new cotton picker with rubber stick roller has simple structure, which consists of metal roller and flexible rubber truncheon mounted on the drum. In operation, the rotation of the rubber stick combats brush and comb for mature boll, and completes cotton picking of wide and narrow row planting patterns. This structure effectively reduces and avoids breaking branches and picking immature cotton bolls, which has high harvesting efficiency and net harvest rate. There was no significant difference in the collect rate of seed cotton picked with rubber-bar roller and with horizontal spindle, but the impurity rate of seed cotton picked with rubber-bar roller was higher. To study the effects of the motion parameters of rubber-roller harvester on cotton harvesting performance in Xinjiang cotton planting pattern, the harvesting principle and the components of rubber-roller harvester were introduced in this paper. The functional relationships between the speed ratio and the harvest angle of rubber bar, the absolute velocity and the roller speed were established based on the displacement and velocity equations of rubber bar, and the influences of speed ratio on cotton harvesting performance were analyzed. In order to shorten the design cycle of cotton picker with rubber stick roller and further improve the job quality of cotton picker, with drawing support from overall performance test, the rubber stick overall function, roller speed, walking speed and axial spacing of roller rubber stick were taken as impact factors, the net harvest rate of cotton, the loss rate of dropping cotton, and the impurity rate were taken as response indices, and the second orthogonal rotation combination test was executed, which used the Design-Expert software at the same time. Finally, the primary and secondary factors were obtained, the regression models were established, and the effect of various factors on the performance indices was analyzed. According to the requirements of cotton harvest in agricultural technology for constraints, the research got the best combination of the parameters by final multi objectives, which was as follows: the rotary speed was 450r/min, the travel speed was 2.4 km/h, and the axial spacing of rubber sticks was 44 mm. According to optimization parameter combination, the verification test was repeated 5 times to eliminate random error. The performance test results were the net harvest rate of 95.78%, the loss rate of dropping cotton of 0.89%, and the impurity rate of 17.44%, which consisted with the field verification test. The 4FS-3 cotton picker with roller rubber stick in harvesting field test showed that the net harvest rate was 95.29%, the loss rate of dropping cotton was 0.97%, and the impurity rate was 17.11% for cotton picker with roller rubber stick. The main performance indicators have reached the national pick machine’s operation performance requirements. The study provides a theoretical basis for the design of key component of picking head and the operating parameters improvement, which effectively improves the harvest efficiency and quality of operations. Exactly it has a certain significance to promote the cotton picker localization and promote the healthy development of domestic cotton industry.