A study on the design of metering device which could work more optimally was conducted to overcome the high friction between the rotor and its metering tube, and the clogging of fertilizer particle on the conventional rotor type metering device. An edge-cell rotor type metering device was proposed to overcome the problems. Objectives of the study were to analyze the torque requirement of the edge-cell type metering device and to design metering device of corn fertilizer applicator with lower torque requirements and high accuracy. A mathematical model to calculate the torque requirement of the rotor was developed and validated using torque measurement in the experiment. Experiments were conducted using a model of fertilizer applicator equipped with a rotor torque measuring sensor and rotated using an electric motor. The torque measurement results showed that the edge-cell type metering device could reduce the torque requirement up to 68% and 80% when tested using urea and TSP, respectively. By using the edge-cell type rotor, there was no problem of clogging of fertilizer particle on the rotor system. The validation results showed that the mathematical model could predict accurately the torque requirement of the rotor only on the lower volume of fertilizer (25%) in the hopper. However, on the higher volume of fertilizer (50% and 100%) in the hopper, the calculated torques was 2-4 times higher than the actual measuring torques. The amount of the fertilizer in the hopper not significantly affected the torque requirement of the rotor.
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