DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE METERING DEVICE OF PLANTER TO BE SUITABLE FOR GARLIC GLOVES PLANTING

Abstract

The object of this study was to develop and evaluate the metering device of planter (Gaspardo) to be suitable for garlic gloves planting. The developed planting unit consists of gloves hopper, moving disc, fixed disc and mixer. This machine was evaluated to find out the optimum operating parameters for planting garlic cloves using versus nine different moving discs (12 cells) having three different cell diameters of 20, 2.5 and 30 mm and three different disc thicknesses of 20, 25 and 30 0m and four machine forward speeds of 1.17, 1.83, 2.61 and 3.65 km/h. The obtained results revealed that the maximum plant emergency ratio of 97.10 % for garlic gloves, the minimum missing hills of 5.1 % and the minimum longitudinal shattering of 0.48 cm were recorded at lower machine forward speed of 1.17 km/h, cell diameter of 30 mm and disc thickness of 30 mm. The minimum missing hills of 5.10 % was recorded at lower machine forward speed of 1.17 km/h, cell diameter of 30 mm and disc thickness of 30 mm. The maximum field capacity and minimum field efficiency of 0.176 fed/h and 67.43 % were recorded at higher machine forward speed of 3.65 km/h.The minimum power required and maximum energy consumed of 9.07 kW and 127.75 kW.h/fed were recorded at lower machine forward speed of 1.17 km/h.The minimum planting cost of 91.08 L.E/fed was recorded at higher machine forward speed of 3.65 km/h compared with manual planting which recorded 438.75 L.E/fed.