Design and experiment of the horizontal brush roll soil clearing device for covering soil above the cold-proof cloth of furrow planting grape

A furrow planting has been widely used for the large-scale vineyards in the Xinjiang of western China. A cold-proof cloth with the buried soil in-furrow planting has posed a great challenge on the spring soil clearing operations for grapes. The recycling of cold-proof cloth is also confined to a large amount of covering soil during the spring soil clearing. The breakage of cold-proof cloth can easily occur when directly pulling the cold-proof cloth between the rows during winding. It is necessary to clear the covering soil above the cold-proof cloth, in order to reduce the cold-proof cloth wind. In this study, a soil clearing device with a horizontally flexible brush roll was developed to remove the covering soil above the coil-proof cloth. Six factors were determined for the operation ranges for better performance, including the forward speed of the machine, the rotation rate of soil clearing assembly, the installation angle, the axial length of the anti-blocking device, the blade declination angle and the blade taper angle. Furthermore, a multi-body dynamics software RecurDyn was used to establish a finite element (FE) flexible body model for the soil clearing assembly, where the cell type was tetrahedral cells. At the same time, a discrete element software EDEM was selected to establish the soil ridge model, whereas, the EDEM-RecurDyn coupled simulation was utilized to establish the soil clearing assembly-soil interaction model for the operation process of soil clearing. A Plackett-Burman simulation was also conducted to select the four factors with the most significant impact on the operating performance, where the soil clearing rate and torque were taken as the test indicators. Then, a Box-Behnken experiment was designed, where the four factors with three levels for each factor. A quadratic regression model was then established for the soil clearing rate and torque. A systematic optimization was implemented, where the maximum soil clearing rate and the minimum torque were taken as the optimization objectives. An optimal combination of parameters was achieved as follows: the forward speed of the machine was 0.3 m/s, the rotation rate was 550 r/min, the installation angle was 30°, blade declination angle was 0°. These optimal parameters were used for the field tests, where the soil clearing rate and torque were 84.12% and 78.62 N·m, respectively, and the relative errors with the simulation and optimization were 3% and 7.2%, respectively. The finding can provide a promising technical reference to design the flexible components of soil clearing in vineyards.