Abstract
Effects of cutter parameters on shearing stress for lettuce harvesting using a specially developed fixture
Highlights
Hydroponic lettuce is a common greenhouse vegetable whose production scale is increasing rapidly[1]
A total of 100 lettuces were selected randomly, where 90 of them were used for the response surface methodology (RSM) tests and the remaining of them were used for the verification tests
The maximum and minimum of shearing stress among the 30 runs were 3.9321×104 Pa and 1.2217×104 Pa, respectively. They were significantly larger or smaller than other groups. From these results (Table 2), a quadratic polynomial model for the four factors and the shearing stress was built by the Design-Expert, as shown in Equation (2)
Summary
Hydroponic lettuce is a common greenhouse vegetable whose production scale is increasing rapidly[1]. Blade installation angle, and other cutter parameters of crop harvesters have an obvious influence on the harvesting quality. Cutter design is an extremely active area of crop harvesters[4,5]. Cho et al.[6] developed a harvesting robot for hydroponic lettuce: a cylinder drove a blade to cut the lettuce, but the blade parameters were not studied. In China, the reciprocating cutters on rice and wheat harvesters, especially the standard blade and arrangement type of cutter, are often used as references for designing crop harvesters[9,10,11,12,13]. Reciprocating cutters have been used on commercial harvesters for lettuce planted in soil[14]
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