Development of vineyard ditcher with reversal twin rotary tillage wheels

Abstract: Grapes are a brilliantly colored, tasty, and nutritious fruit popular among consumers. As human dietary preferences change and leisure tourism develops, suburban efficient sightseeing vineyards have attracted more and more attention and will promote grape industry development, increasing the prevalence of large, grape-picking gardens in urban areas. In addition, the grape industry has become an important source of suburban wealth. The cultivation mode of grapes is frame type, and its space is so narrow and low that small orchard-management machinery does not work well. During grape planting and management, plowing and fertilizer application (especially fertilizer injection) are very important processes that have critical influence on grape yield and sugar content. Traditionally, vineyard fertilizer is a manual process with high labor intensity and low work efficiency. To improve production efficiency in fertilizer application, a small fertilizer injector for vineyards was adapted from the design of larger agricultural machines. It works by submerged, reverse rotary tillage. Motor power is divided into two independent gearboxes and drive trains, one drives the rotary tillage wheels, and the other drives the drive wheels. Soil knocks against a retaining plate and is thrown to both sides of the slot created as the rotary tillage wheels' blades cut through the soil.The submerged reverse rotary tillage wheel consists of a homemade curved knife, a homemade wide wing knife, the wheel hub, bar, the cutter holder, and the wheel assembly. Both the homemade curved knife and the homemade wide wing knife are divided into two discs (left and right); the left rotary tillage wheel installed left direction and the right installed right. The radius of the rotary tillage wheels is 300 mm. The distance between the left and right rotary tillage wheels is 250 mm, creating a furrow width of about 250 mm. The knife assembly that installed on each rotary tillage wheel consists of 16 knives which distribute in the hub evenly.The depth of the slot may be controlled by the guide wheel. The angle and opening of retaining plate may be regulated by adjustment device so that soil will be thrown to both sides of the furrow, and not back into the slot. The small clear plough, which was installed in the gearbox, can break balky soil, and that broken soil can be thrown out by rotary tillage wheels' blade.A prototype injector was made and tested for field use. The results showed that the injector could open a furrow at a depth of 500 mm through two-time ditching and a width of 200 mm, which met the agricultural fertilizer requirement of the ditcher for vineyard. The machine can pulverize soil and eject it as well making it suitable for the management of suburban vineyards.