DESIGN AND FABRICATE A METERING DEVICE OF VACUUM SEEDER TO SUIT EGYPTIAN COTTON

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop a design, fabricate and test a metering device to suit hill-dropped for Egyptian cotton cultivar a precision planting. The developed metering device was fabricated from local materials Stainless Steel 304. Tests were conducted at an indoor field facility under different operational parameters. These were three seed plates with four level of forward speeds (2.2, 3.1, 4.3 and 5.0 km/h). Measurements were taken for average plant number per hill, coefficient of variation of plant number per hill, mean hill distance, coefficient of variation of hill distance, seed miss index, seed multiple index, quality of feed index, precision in spacing, and plant scattering along the length of the row was investigated under field conditions. The economic assessment of the use a vacuum precision planter, rather than traditional method. Results indicated that the optimum values of the mean hill distance of 16.7 cm, mean plant number per hill ranged from 2 to 3 seeds, seed miss index 10%, seed multiple index of zero%, quality of feed index of 90%, precision in spacing of 19% were obtained with the seed plate (1).The statistical analysis showed that the most desirable conditions in terms of operating developed metering device were obtained at 3.1 km/h forward speed for the seed plate (1).