Design and experiment of driving-type crushing-weeding multi-functional potato cultivator

Abstract: Potato is one of the fourth staple food crops in China. Medium tillage operations such as loosening soil, crushing soil, soil cultivation and weeding during the early seedling and middle growth stages of potatoes have a great influence on potato yield. The main functions of mid-tillage include loosening soil, enhancing soil permeability, preserving soil moisture and drought resistance, improving soil physical properties, improving soil fertility and eliminating weeds, and mid-tillage can resist lodging and increase crop yield. Potato mid-tillage production has a large amount of work and its operation process is limited by growing crops. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop a potato mid-tillage machine with high working efficiency and good operation effect. Aiming at the problems of low soil breaking rate, weeding rate and poor soil cultivation effect of traditional hoe-shovel type cultivator under the condition of soil cohesion and compaction, a driving potato cultivator which integrates the functions of deep loosening and crushing soil, weed eradication, side deep fertilization, soil cultivation and ridging is designed in this paper, the key parts of the machine and the structure of the deep loosening shovel, soil crusher and soil cultivator are designed and analysed. On the basis of design and analysis, field experiments are carried out. The machine is mainly composed of deep loose soil device, soil conservation device, fertilization device and transmission system. Eight blade dishes are installed symmetrically on the left and right sides of the blade shaft. Each blade dish is fixed with two soil breaking blades. The length of the soil breaking blade is 242 mm, the width of the soil breaking blade is 40 mm and the thickness of the soil breaking blade is 10 mm. In order to adapt to different kind of soil conditions, the adjustment range of the subsolier is 150-250 mm, the height of the subsolier is 560 mm. The test results show that the soil breaking rate of driving-type cultivator is 95.1%, weeding rate is 96.3% and the injury rate is 1.2%, the soil bulkiness is 21.5%, and the fuel consumption is 13.2 kg/hm2, which met the relevant performance evaluation indicators. Compared with the traditional hoe-shovel type cultivator, the soil breaking rate of, weeding rate and soil bulkiness of the driving-type cultivator increase by 3.3, 3.1 and 2.7 percentage points, injury rate and fuel consumption decrease by 1.6 percentage points and 28.3%. The operation effect of the driving-type cultivator has been improved significantly, exceeding the national standards and meeting the requirements of potato cultivation and agronomy. This research results can provide a reference for the development of potato cultivators.