OPTIMISATION OF WORKING PARAMETERS FOR SPOT FERTILISATION DEVICE WITH ECCENTRIC INTERMITTENT MECHANISM

To achieve precise fertilisation and improve fertiliser utilisation, an eccentric intermittent spot fertilisation device was designed in this study. The device can concentrate the continuous fertiliser flow from the fertiliser discharger into intermittently discharged fertiliser clusters, and accelerate the discharge of fertiliser into the fertiliser furrow through a Geneva mechanism. Full factorial experiments based on DEM-MBD coupled simulation show that both travel speed of implement and fertiliser discharge mass had a significant effect on the degree of dispersion and the coefficient of variation (CV) of fertiliser discharge. When the travel speed was 2.5 m/s and the fertiliser discharge mass was 6 g, the device had the best performance (degree of dispersion was 5.57 and the CV of fertiliser discharge was 3.27%). The results of the soil bin verification experiment indicate that the fertiliser pile length was 81.9 mm and the CV of fertiliser discharge was 4.30% under the optimum combination of working parameters. The absolute error between this result and the simulation result was 0.04 and 1.03%. This study shows that the device has better performance under the optimal working parameters.