Description of furrow shaping created by single standard tines

Abstract

Design

optimization and online evaluation of work quality of tillage tools help to find optimal balance between effort and result in tillage operation. Currently, usage of laser scanner has become widespread to examine the soil profile after tillage. However, the results are significantly affected by external circumstances in the field such as sunlight, weeds, residual of plant, etc. Therefore, a soil bin test was carried out by using a laser scanner to evaluate the width and the area of the furrow (shape of furrow) created by using four standard chisel plow tines heavy duty, double heart, double heart with wing and duck foot with widths of cut 0.065, 0.135, 0.450, and 0.400 m, respectively at different speeds and depths. MATLAB based computer program was used to estimate soil profile parameters. Lab results were verified in a field test. The field results were evaluated based on geometric shape of the furrow obtained from the soil bin and a model based on Willatt and Willis's approach in predicting the furrow shape. Results show that the width of the furrow increases linearly with depth while the area of the furrow increases quadratically with depth for all tines. An excellent geometric shape of the furrow was obtained from the soil bin for every tine. The furrow shape is triangle for heavy duty and double heart tines, while it is triangle plus trapezoidal shape for double heart with wings and duck foot tines. Willatt and Willis's equation related to the width of the furrow shows a good agreement for heavy duty and double heart tines at shallow depth.