Abstract
In Huang-Huai-Hai plain of China, farmers collect the maize straw for livestock during maize harvest to increase their revenue. To maintain the sustainable productivity of the soil, all straw after the wheat harvest is returned to the field. This straw brings difficulties in the no-till seeding for maize after wheat harvest, and thus it is necessary to develop efficient no-till seeders that can cope with heavy residue and improve sowing quality. In this work, we designed a wide-strip-till no-till pneumatic maize (WNPM) seeder to satisfy the need in this plain. The key parameters of the opposite-placed anti-blocking mechanism of the WNPM seeder were determined via the discrete element method (DEM) technology, while the parameters of the pneumatic maize seed meter were specified using the coupled simulation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and DEM. We also carried out field experiment to test the performance of our machine. Under the operating speed of 8 km/h, the soil disturbance was 38.2%. Moreover, the straw cleaning rate achieved 94.4% in the seeding belt while the residue cover index of the seed plot was over 58%, and the seeding performance was improved significantly. The qualified seed spacing index, uniformity variation coefficient, qualified index of sowing depth and variation coefficient of sowing depth were 96.6%, 19.1%, 95.1% and 3.2%, respectively. In general, the WNPM seeder improves the working efficiency of maize sowing because both the reliable working speed and the sowing quality were increased. These results are of considerable importance for crop production in Huang-Huai-Hai plain of China.
Highlights
The Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, with an area of 3 × 105 km2, is located in the eastern part of China, ranging from 31◦36 N to 40◦29 N and 112◦13 E to 120◦53 E [1]
It has been demonstrated that conservation tillage (CT) can improve the water use efficiency, reduce wind and water erosion, increase yields of winter wheat and summer maize by 7–12%, and reduce costs by up to 20%, compared with the traditional tillage [6,7,8,9,10]
We report development and first results of a wide-strip-till no-till pneumatic maize (WNPM) seeder in HuangHuai-Hai Plain of China, aiming at improving the working efficiency of maize sowing to overcome the problems caused by the heavy residue
Summary
The Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, with an area of 3 × 105 km, is located in the eastern part of China, ranging from 31◦36 N to 40◦29 N and 112◦13 E to 120◦53 E [1]. Considering the surface of the farmland was covered with wheat straw in double-cropping area of Huang-Huai-Hai Plain of China, the WNPM seeder was composed of opposite-placed anti-blocking mechanism, subsoiling device, powered rake device, multiple profiling devices’ profiling mechanism, transmissions, and air suction seed-metering device, etc. This complete machine was 2.5 m wide and 2.6 m long with four sets of seeding units. The movement of seed which was guided by the seed guided groove would become more stable as the contact area increased by increasing h1 and decreasing σ, seed adsorbing progress would be affected through severe disturbance of the seed population
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