Design Of The Sweet Potato Vine Recycling Machine

Sweet potato is one of China’s four major crops. In recent years, China has become the world’s largest producer with sweet potato widely distributed across the country. With the development of agricultural mechanization, more and more mechanized operations have been used in sweet potato harvest. But sweet potato vine is very lush during their growth process, especially in the year of more precipitation or in the land of more fertilization during mature period. The vine length of some varieties even reaches 4 meters, which makes the work of removing them relatively hard. At present, compared with other countries, the development of vine processing machinery in China is still in its initial stage. However, the cutting-off vines method in China are mostly by intensive labors with high costs and low efficiency, which adversely affects the normal harvest of sweet potato. The production processes of sweet potato, which is a kind of crop growing on the ground, consist of seeding, tillage, fertilization, ridging, transplanting, cultivating management, removing vines, digging, picking, and storage, etc, among which the work of removing vines before harvest is more time consuming and labor-intensive. As the contradiction of structural shortage of rural labors in China intensifies, farmers are eager to see the mechanized production in sweet potato, especially in the removing vines process. So the research and development of applicable sweet potato vine handling machine is of great significance.With respect to the above problems and combined with agronomic requirements in sweet potato harvest, a new type of vine recycling machine is designed to complete the processes of vine cutting, conveying, crushing and header in one time. That advantageously promoted the mechanization development of sweet potato vine, thus greatly accelerating the comprehensive mechanization in this field. The machine is located in the side of the tractor, mainly composed of vine cutting device, vine delivery device, vine crushing, collection device and hydraulic device as well as shock absorber. Cutting device is located on the front side of the tractor frame, including hop vine stem, a pair of profiling wheel, a pair of reel, cutter, hydraulic device and shock absorber; Delivery device consists of two pairs of conveyor; crushing and collection device includes a shredder, a fan and a set of vine container. When the machine works, the power is transmitted by a tractor to the three devices. The vine is cut off by the cutter located on both sides and the lower side of the frame and pushed by the reel into the conveyor belt and then caught by two pairs of conveyor belts into the grinder in the inclined top and lastly blew into the vine containers by the fan after full crush. The combination structure of reel and cutter can effectively achieve the smooth vine cutting-off and improve work efficiency; The strengthening cutter on the sides of rack and under it is equipped with blades to cut the vines covering two sides of the gong with the result of higher cleaned efficiency; the cited dial conveyor belt grips vine to do obliquely upward movement, prompting the separation of tuber and vine; Meanwhile, the effective mechanical, electrical and hydraulic combination will accelerate the development of agricultural machinery products.CAD software is used for mapping the two-dimensional map of machine assembly drawings and parts diagrams; UG software is used in various parts of sweet potato vine recycling machines for three-dimensional modeling and for virtual assembly in machines; ANSYS and ADMAS simulation analysis software are used for the finite element analysis of key components in the machine to verify the design meets the requirements, thus making the machine more rational in structure; Finally to cutting vine test and provides reference for the prototype design.