JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY
Year:2017 | Volume:6 | Issue:2|Papers Count:24

Introduction: In recent years due to lack of water resources in our country, planting of bare root seedlings of onion has been welcomed by farmers. Considering the desired high dense planting of Iranian farmers, lack of proper transplanting machine has appeared as the main problem. To overcome this problem, some researchers tested a few methods, but none of them reached to complete successfully. …

Introduction: Maximum efficiency of natural resources, reduced risk of production, improved fertility of soil, and increased production per area enjoyment have made intercropping a preferential practice compared with cropping. One of the fundamental problems in this kind of cropping is non-existence of suitable machines. In this research, a new intercropping machine has been designed and built for intercropping of corn and bean with precise ratios and different planting patterns. …

Introduction: Researchers frequently include multiple cultivars and fertility levels in field experiments. Therefore, the experiments sowing operation must represent a considerable saving in time and labor, compared to hand sowing. Greater flexibility in experimental design and setup could be achieved by equipment that enables quick changes in the cultivar and fertilizer rates from one plot to the next. …

Introduction: Nowadays, in a lot of farm land due to reasons such as high density, heavy textured soils, steep terrain and a large body of water at each irrigation, rapid and complete absorption of water in the soil does not happen and runoff will be accrued. Improvement of infiltration reduces runoff and thus increases available water capacity. The main methods used to increase the infiltration area: The use of soil amendments, soil management by tillage and conservation farming. These methods may be used separately or together. …

Introduction: One of the ways used for minimizing the cost of maintenance and repairs of rotating industrial equipment is condition monitoring using acoustic analysis. One of the most important problems which always have been under consideration in industrial equipment application is confidence possibility. Each dynamic, electrical, hydraulic or thermal system has certain characteristics which show the normal condition of the machine during function. …

Introduction: The diagnosis of agricultural machinery faults must be performed at an opportune time, in order to fulfill the agricultural operations in a timely manner and to optimize the accuracy and the integrity of a system, proper monitoring and fault diagnosis of the rotating parts is required. With development of fault diagnosis methods of rotating equipment, especially bearing failure, the security, performance and availability of machines has been increasing. In general, fault detection is conducted through a specific procedure which starts with data acquisition and continues with features extraction, and subsequently failure of the machine would be detected. …

Introduction: Automation of agricultural and machinery construction has generally been enhanced by intelligent control systems due to utility and efficiency rising, ease of use, profitability and upgrading according to market demand. A broad variety of industrial merchandise are now supplied with computerized control systems of earth moving processes to be performed by construction and agriculture field vehicle such as grader, backhoe, tractor and scraper machines. A height control machine which is used in measuring base thickness is consisted of two mechanical and electronic parts. …

Introduction: In conventional methods of spraying in orchards, the amount of pesticide sprayed, is not targeted. The pesticide consumption data indicates that the application rate of pesticide in greenhouses and orchards is more than required. Less than 30% of pesticide sprayed actually reaches nursery canopies while the rest are lost and wasted. Nowadays, variable rate spray applicators using intelligent control systems can greatly reduce pesticide use and off-target contamination of environment in nurseries and orchards. …

Introduction: The efficiency and cost effectiveness of orchard pest management programs are influenced by the skills of managers and sprayer operators who evaluate orchard conditions and alter machine settings and operating techniques to optimize performance of sprayers. A combination of operational skill, equipment performance, timing and chemical selection is necessary for optimal results. …

Introduction: Calotropis is an evergreen and perennial shrub that grows in tropical areas of Iran and has valuable fibers in the bark of its stem. Fibers obtained from Calotropis stem have 75% cellulose. Tensile strength and modulus of the fibers is more than Cotton and elongation of the fibers is higher than Linen fibers. Calotropis stem fibers are researched for paper pulp applications and also has been evaluated for some applications such as their fiber characteristics for cloth making. …

Introduction: The main producers of lentil are Canada, India, Nepal and China, respectively and Iran is the ninth producer in the world. The hand pulling is the usual method of lentil harvesting. Use of conventional combine because of short leg varieties, wide combine head in dry land and grain losses by cutter bar vibrations is impossible. So a mechanism should be designed to harvest the lentil plants with minimum damage. …

Introduction: The noticeable proportion of producing wheat losses occur during production and consumption steps and the loss due to harvesting with combine harvester is regarded as one of the main factors. A grain combines harvester consists of different sets of equipment and one of the most important parts is the header which comprises more than 50% of the entire harvesting losses. …

Introduction: Olive (Oleo europaea) includes about 20 species of small trees from Oleaceae family. This point should be considered that Iran has allocated only a small universal market to its olive products in spite of having high production potentials; so that about 23 provinces of this country can produce olive products. Therefore mechanizing of olive production and encouraging to develop olive trade are among the effective methods for development of this market. …

Introduction: The lignocelluloses materials have high potential for producing various types of biofuels. These materials include various parts of plants, especially leaves and stems that are left without a specific usage after annual pruning. These residues can be used through slow or fast pyrolysis process for production of liquid and gaseous biofuels. The slow pyrolysis is taking place at temperatures below 500oC while fast pyrolysis process takes place at a temperature above 700oC. …

Introduction: Biodiesel is a promising renewable substitute source of fuel produced from tree born oils, vegetable based oils, fats of animals and even waste cooking oil, has been identified as one of the key solutions for the alarming global twin problems of fossil fuel depletion and environmental degradation. One of the sources for biodiesel production is mastic which is often grown in mountains. …

Introduction: Drying is one of the most common methods for storing food and agricultural products. During drying process, free water that causes the growth of microorganisms and spoilage of products is removed from the product. There are several methods for drying of agricultural products. one of the most important methods of investment is drying by using sunlight. …

Introduction: Potato (Solanumtuberosum L.) is one of the unique and most potential crops having high productivity, supplementing major food requirement in the world. Drying is generally carried out for two main reasons, one to reduce the water activity which eventually increases the shelf life of food and second to reduce the weight and bulk of food for cheaper transport and storage. …

Introduction: Seventy million tons of agricultural crops are produced from 18 million hectares of agricultural lands in Iran every year. Since 80% of the crops (wt. basis) ends up as residues, therefore, about 50 million tons of crop residues are generated annually the majority of which is burnt on field leading to vast emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) due to the incomplete combustion process. These residues could potentially be transformed into heat energy directly by adopting a burning process or indirectly by first transforming them into secondary fuel as hydrogen, bio-methane, methanol or ethanol. …

Introduction: People in different jobs may face skeletal problems in their body due to poor physical conditions as a result of poor working conditions and inappropriate equipment. Harvesting tea is one of those jobs that are known as a very vigorous process and it requires hard work and perseverance. Moreover, after water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. This fact highlights the great importance of jobs related to tea. The most prevailing method used for tea harvesting in Iran is manual harvesting, although this job in some regions is mechanized. Manual harvesting intensifies the hardness of this job. …

Introduction: Direct planting becomes more common in the recent years, because it conserves soil and water as well as it saves energy and time. However, this technology needs special implements such as seed planter. Given that direct planting is practiced in undisturbed lands, so it was needed to design a special furrow opener. In order to obtain a suitable furrow opener this experiment was conducted in rain-fed Agricultural Research Institute in Maragheh. …

Introduction: Nowadays, agricultural systems are seeking economic, ecological and bioenvironmental goals for production of agricultural crops with protection and sustainability of the environment. Therefore, there is need to extend sustainable agricultural systems such as conservation agriculture. One of the principles of conservation agriculture is conservation tillage. Conservation tillage is a kind of tillage that retains crop residues on the soil surface or mixes it with soil using related machines. …

Introduction: While the world's population is growing, agricultural production is still based on the use of limited and nonrenewable resources. In addition to the scarcity of resources, their continuous using over the long term, causes the widespread pollution, loss of soil fertility and low agricultural production capacity, eventually. The main causes of the increase in energy consumption include the increase of world population, limited arable land, low price of fuel and fertilizer and noted increased levels of human life. …

Introduction: The working day is an important component in selection and analysis of farm machinery systems. The number of working days is affected by various factors such as climate, soil characteristics and type of operation. Daily soil moisture models based on weather long-term data and soil characteristics were almost used for calculating probability of working days. The goal of this study was to develop a simulation model to predict the number of working days for secondary tillage and planting operation in fall at 50, 80 and 90% probability levels. …

Introduction: Measurement of the draft force exerted from agricultural machineries to the tractor and the calculation of the implement power requirements is important for agriculturalists from machine design and tractor-machine matching viewpoints. Therefore, studies about this issue have been started from the 1950’s. Zoerb et al. (1983) claimed that the first dynamometers have been made of spring and in reality, users had difficulties reading these dynamometers gauge due to the quick variations of the gauge pointer. …