The results of study of a multifunctional tillage unit with a set of replaceable adapters

Federal Agricultural Research Center of the North-East has developed a basic model of a tillage unit with replaceable working bodies in the form of flat-cutting hoes or duckfoot shovels, the combination of which with disk sections allows in compliance with basic agrotechnical requirements to perform primary non-moldboard tillage of 14–25 cm and a complex of operations of pre-sowing soil cultivation operations of 5–14 cm. Further development of the unit design is aimed at improving the quality of processing the surface layer of soil by equipping the basic model with replaceable adapters for additional soil processing. Initially, a set of replaceable adapters was manufactured for the research, including the following types of rollers: tubular, spiral-tubular, rod and bar-tooth. The purpose of the research was to evaluate the effectiveness of using a unit with replaceable adapters for processing the surface layer of soil during basic non-moldboard and shallow tillage. The research was conducted in the form of field tests, during which the main indicators of the quality of soil cultivation were determined: fractional composition of the soil, density, stability of the depth of cultivation and surface ridge. It was revealed that when the unit performed the basic non-moldboard tillage of light loamy soil, the degree of its crumbling, depending on the type of adapter, was 82.7...95.3 %, when performing shallow tillage, the content of the soil fraction less than 25 mm was 82.5...89.7 %, which fully met the agrotechnical requirements. The parameters of processing depth during basic non-moldboard and shallow tillage indicated a sufficiently high stability of the depth of the working body travel. Agrotechnical assessment during primary soil cultivation showed that the surface ridge during autumn cultivation of clean fallow was 30...36 mm, and during cultivation of grain stubble – 46 mm. In the variants of the unit equipped with working bodies for shallow tillage, this indicator varied within the range of 20...28 mm. The soil density after basic non-moldboard tillage was 1.22...1.31 g/cm 3 , after shallow tillage – 1.16...1.24 g/cm 3 . The obtained data indicate that the operation of the unit in all configuration options meets the agrotechnical requirements for pre-sowing and autumn tillage.