Abstract
The objective of this study was to explore the physical properties of maize seeds in competition with weeds. The basic and complex geometric characteristics of seeds from maize plants, competing with Datura stramonium L. (DS) or Xanthium strumarium (XS) at different weed densities, were studied. It was found that the basic and complex geometric characteristics of maize seeds, such as dimension, aspect ratio, equivalent diameter, sphericity, surface area and volume, were significantly affected by weed competition. The increase in weed density from 0 to 8 plants m2 resulted in an increase in the angle of repose from 27° to 29°, while increasing weed density from 8 to 16 plants m2 caused a diminution of the angle of repose down to 28°. Increasing the density of XS and DS to 16 plants m2 caused a reduction in the maximum 1000 seed weight of maize by 40.3% and 37.4%, respectively. These weed side effects must be considered in the design of industrial equipment for seed cleaning, grading and separation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to consider the effects of weed competition on maize traits, which are important in industrial processing such as seed aeration, sifting and drying.
Highlights
The harmful effects of weeds include crop growth inhibition, added protection costs, reduced farm products quality, reduced animal products quality, increased production costs, reduced harvest efficiency and increased processing costs, with resulting effects on water management and human health [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The innovativeness of this work was to quantify the effects of D. stramonium and X
We evaluated the effect of weed competition on the geometric characteristics of maize seeds
Summary
The harmful effects of weeds include crop growth inhibition, added protection costs, reduced farm products quality, reduced animal products quality, increased production costs, reduced harvest efficiency and increased processing costs, with resulting effects on water management and human health [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Many problems with the design of agricultural machinery are associated with the physical and engineering properties of crops, and the analysis of product behaviour during agricultural processing operations such as handling, planting, harvesting, threshing, cleaning, sorting and drying is fundamental to resolving this problem [8,9,10,11,12]. These properties are important in the construction of bulk storage facilities and the calculation of intermediate holding bin dimension capacity. Problems associated with bin design should not be attributed to disagreement among design philosophies, but rather to a serious lack of understanding of certain grain properties and how they relate to bin design [13,14,15]
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