Performance testing of vegetable chopping machine based on LabVIEW and operation parameter optimization

Abstract: In order to make the vegetable waste processing easier and more efficient, machinery is replacing the manual labor step by step. The chopping machine has been gradually more and more applied in China. Vegetable-chopping machine can cut the vegetable into small fragments continuously and quickly, and it is especially applied to chop root, stem, and foliage vegetables. However, the development of the vegetable chopping machine is extremely slow, which leads to a low production efficiency, and even brings harm to personal or property safety. In order to improve the work performance of the chopping machinery, a performance testing platform for vegetable chopping was built and a cutterhead was designed in this study. The testing platform consists of chopping system, data acquisition system and product granularity analysis system. Data acquisition system is used to collect the torque, revolving speed and power of cutterhead, whose controlling program is compiled in LabVIEW. The main function of product granularity analysis system is to investigate the chopping degree of product. With this performance testing platform, a series of vegetable chopping experiments were conducted to find out the influence of the blade number and cutting speed on cutterhead. The chopping experiments were operated in 2stages. In the first stage, Chinese cabbage samples were respectively chopped by 1, 2 and 3 blades with different rotation speeds of 1000, 1200 and 1400 r/min. The experiment in this stage was to obtain the reasonable usable range of blade number and rotation speed of cutterhead. In the second stage, potato and celery samples were minced based on the results of former stage. Then, the exact number of blades in cutterhead and the suitable rotation speed were discussed for different vegetables. All related experiments were performed at the Key Laboratory of Bionic Engineering (Ministry of Education, China), Jilin University in 2015. Experimental investigation showed that for leafy vegetables like Chinese cabbage, the chopping performance of cutterhead was the best when the number of blades in cutterhead was 2 and its rotation speed was 1400 r/min; for root or stem vegetables like potato, the suitable number of blades in cutterhead was 3 and the rotation speed was 1400 r/min; for leafy or stem vegetables like celery whose fiber is more abundant and longer, 3 blades with 1400 r/min was better for cutterhead. In short, the most applicable blade number for vegetable cutterhead was 2 or 3 and the rotation speed was 1400r/min, with which the cutterhead had an ideal ability to mince the common root, stem and leafy vegetables. In addition, the experiment showed that the performance testing platform had the advantages of high work stability, high precision, favorable using interface, and so on, which could not only implement the test with the visualization device, but also increase the processing velocity. It could be generalized to other mechanical testing benches effectively. This work provides the strong technical support for design and improvement of vegetable cutterhead.