Mechanical Design and Simulation Testing of Rope Pollination Equipment for Hybrid Rice Seed Production

Abstract

In view of the urgent need for pollination equipment for existing hybrid rice and the practical problems of traditional manual pollen-driving, such as high labor intensity, low efficiency, and easy-to-break rice stems, an automatic pollen-driving system combining traditional manual and mechanical auxiliary control was designed. According to the analysis of the driving process, the driving speed v and the rope height h are the main factors affecting the bending degree of rice stems (the cross-section angle θ of rice stems). Through shear and extrusion tests, the characteristic parameters of rice stems and the bonding parameters of the rice stem bonding model were obtained. The test results showed that when the bending angle of the rice stem was 47°, the maximum shear force of the rice stem was 5.42 N. A quadratic orthogonal rotation combination simulation test was carried out using the discrete element method (EDEM), and the optimal parameter combination of powder driving speed and rope height was determined. The angle error between the measured angle value and that obtained by the constraint solving tool of Design-Expert software was less than 5%. Furthermore, combined with field experiments, through the optimization of the pollen-driving operation parameters, the phenomenon of rice breakage was reduced in the process of pollen-driving. Therefore, the research in this paper can provide certain references for the design of hybrid rice powder-driven systems and the optimization of operating parameters.