Research Of Mechanical Properties And Smash Components Of Maize Straw

As the fast development of animal husbandry, the problems of animal overloading and lacking of fodder will be more and more serious. Every year about0.13billion tons of maize straw is produced in China. The environment and animal husbandry will benefit a lot if the straw used to feed herds. The smash components developed in this paper can be mounted on the combine harvester, so the harvest of corn, smash of straw and tie of the straw can be done as a sequence. The solution smashes the maize straw into strips along its stem, the smash size is similar to the grass, it can be dried soon after being pushed down so the nutrition and quality can be kept very well, also after dried the fodder can be stored and the cost of transport decreased, this provides a good solution to the lacking of fodder in the pastoral areas. In this paper we tested the shear force and compress properties of maize straw. We also designed the smash components and the experiment platform and we also preceded some field experiments, the following are the experimental details.1. Using the versatile holographical machine to measure the shear force and compress properties of maize straw, in the experiments we analyzed the horizon effect of harvest time, smash region, angle of the blade, knot and the smash velocity. We also measure the effect of harvest time, smash region and compressing velocity to the maximum force of compressing. We designed some experiments through orthogonal experiment methods to analyze the effect of these factors, the range and variance analysis was given as results.2. Based on the requirements of maize straw smash, we designed a component which can be mounted on the combine harvester and it can harvest the straw and the corn ears. This component contains a pair of corn ears collectors, a pair of smash rollers, motion transfer and support equipments. In order to measure the performance of different rollers, we designed three kinds of smash rollers:nail-like roller, rotate-knives roller and saw-like roller.3. Design of experimental platform, the platform contains straw inlet, fodder outlet, com ears collector, stem-smash roller, motion transfer, frame and the control box. The three kinds of smash roller would be tested on this platform. The experimental results implied that the saw-like roller was the best design. Based on this kind of design, we test the effect of rotate velocity to the smash performance, the result implied that when the ratio of the rotate velocity of the smash roller to rotate velocity of the corn ear collector roller is1.4:1, the roller tied no straw and could achieved a good performance.4. Field experiments, we mounted the smash components to the combine harvester and did some experiments in the corn field. The velocity of the combine harvester is2.17km/s, the rotate velocity of the smash roller is1000r/min and the rotate velocity of corn collecting roller is1400r/min. The component worked well in the experiments, no tied straw and no jams, also the performance of smash is good enough.With the components designed in this paper, the efficiency of the combine harvester increases, the processing cost of maize straw decreases, and achieves good economic benefits. This design provides a great idea to the processing of maize straw.