Development of a Locally Vacuum Vegetable Seeder for Nursery Trays | ||
| Journal of Soil Sciences and Agricultural Engineering | ||
| Article 9, Volume 7, Issue 8, August 2016, Pages 595-602 PDF (743.83 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/jssae.2016.39766 | ||
| Authors | ||
| H. EL-Ghobashy; T. Mohamed; A. EL-Ashker; Y. Shabaan | ||
| Agric. Res. Center, Dokki, Egypt | ||
| Abstract | ||
| A continuous feeding mechanism for precision vacuum trays seeder was developed and fabricated from locally materials for seeding single seed in the trays. The developed seeder was evaluated under two trays types of 84 and 209 cells, four different suction pressure levels (0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2 kPa) & (0.3, 0.6, 0.9 and 1.2 kPa) and four different hole size diameters of seed plate (1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 mm) & (0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 mm) for cucumber and cabbage seeds respectively. The seeding unit comprises of different parts whose functions are coordinated to place one seed into the center of tray cells in certain position. Trays were placed one by one without any gap in between for continuous seeding. Seeded trays were collected from the other end of the machine. The performance of the seeder was evaluated using the singulation efficiency, seed utilization efficiency, seeding efficiency, the seeder productivity, the specific energy requirement and the seeding operation costs. It was found that the trays seeder productivity was 240 trays h-1 (20160 and 50160 cells h-1 for cucumber and cabbage seeds respectively). The proper seeder results for seeding singles seed in trays (90.5 and 70.4% ) were obtained with the dual interaction effect between the suction pressure at 1.5 and 0.9 kPa and hole diameter at 1.6 and 0.8 mm for cucumber and cabbage seeds respectively, when the consumed specific energy of 4.16×10-3 kWh tray-1. The precision trays seeder reduced the estimated cost by 5 to 12 times than the seeding trays manually for cucumber and cabbage respectively. | ||
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