Design and experiment on the tray embedding machine for hybrid rice potted seedlings

摘要

Hybrid rice is one of the main crops in China. Traditional blanket-type seedling is not suitable for hybrid rice because the seedling root will be hurt when transplanting the seedling from the seedling blanket This will influence the growth of the seedling and decrease the yield. Therefore potted-seedling is adopted in hybrid rice transplanting which requires 2±1 seeds in each hole. However the general soft potted-seedling tray cannot be stacked when germinating the seedlings indoor, which will occupy too much space. Therefore the method of embedding the soft seedling tray in a hard one was proposed. The seeds are placed into the soft tray which has been embedded in the hard tray. In order to fulfill the automatic seeding for hybrid rice, a machinethat embeds the soft seedling tray into hard one is necessary which includes the process of separating the soft tray and placing the soft tray into hard one. A machine using vacuum generator and vacuum nozzle to separate the stacked soft trays was designed in this paper. Detail design and structure optimization was conducted by using SolidWorks and Ansys. An experimental prototype was set up to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The experiment results indicated the designed machine can fulfdl separating the trays successfully.