Abstract
Most of the commercially-available pot seedling nursery machines are incompatible with soft-pot-trays and are labor-intensive and low in productivity. A soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system was developed in this study to achieve automatic embedding of the soft pot tray into the hard tray following sowing and covering with soil. A control system was constructed using the Arduino program development environment. An embedded-hard-tray automatic lowering mechanism and conveyor-belt-based pot-tray embedding system were designed. Dynamics analysis was conducted to derive an equation to describe the embedding process of the soft pot tray into the embedded hard tray. A prototype of the soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system was manufactured and tested. The analytical equation suggested that a minimum linear velocity of 0.86 m/s was required for a complete embedding process. The experimental results showed that the embedded-hard-tray automatic lowering mechanism was reliable and stable as the tray placement success rate was greater than 99%. The successful tray embedding rate was 100% and the seed exposure rate was less than 1% with a linear velocity of the conveyor belt of 0.92 m/s. The experiment findings agreed well with the analytical results. The proposed soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system satisfied the technical specifications for a light-economical pot seedling nursery machine. Keywords: automatic embedding, pot seedling nursery machine, embedded hard tray, soft pot tray, conveyor-belt embedding system DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20201301.4726 Citation: Chen L T, Ma X, Wang C, Li H W, Li Z H, Chen X S, et al. Design and test of soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system for light-economical pot seedling nursery machine. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2020; 13(1): 91–100.
Highlights
Most of the commercially-available pot seedling nursery machines are incompatible with soft-pot-trays and are labor-intensive and low in productivity
A soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system was developed in this study to achieve automatic embedding of the soft pot tray into the hard tray following sowing and covering with soil
The proposed soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system satisfied the technical specifications for a light-economical pot seedling nursery machine
Summary
It is desired to develop a pot seedling nursery machine for soft pot trays. A pot seedling nursery machine usually performs multiple tasks from soil-bed setting to soil-bed compaction to precise sowing to soil coverage and clean-up[12]. The US and some European countries have developed good quality, highly automatic seed nursery machines such as Blackmore System, Speedling System, Marksman, and Hamilton for economic crops such as vegetables and flowers[15,16,17,18,19] They designed automatic nursery-tray-providing devices of hard trays that supply trays by a combination of pneumatic and mechanical principles. A pneumatically driven automatic tray-providing device is costly and it generates vibration during operation, which is undesired for seedling transplantation To solve these problems, Ma Xu et al [23] developed an electronically controlled hard and soft trays automatic providing system which used a STM 32 micro-controller as the control core to overcome the problems. A principle prototype was manufactured and experiments were conducted to validate the theoretical analysis and evaluate the structure, working conditions, and main parameters of the soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system
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