DESIGN AND TEST OF QUANTITATIVE FERTILIZER FEEDING DEVICE FOR POINT-APPLIED FERTILIZATION DEVICE

To ensure accurate and consistent fertilizer application, the key component of the fertilizer feeding device, the grooved wheel, was designed and theoretically analyzed, and the number of grooves of the fertilizer wheel was determined to be 9. The effects of grooves inclination angle, grooves length and operating speed on the fertilizer feeding performance were analyzed by single-factor tests, and the appropriate range of factors was determined. The effect of the interaction between groove length and operating speed on the amount of fertilizer discharged from the groove was investigated by a full factorial test, and a quadratic regression was fitted to the test results to establish the regression equations of groove length and operating speed on the average fertilizer application per groove and the coefficient of variation of the average fertilizer application per groove, which can be used to predict the average fertilizer application per groove and the coefficient of variation of the average fertilizer application per groove to solve for groove length and operating speed.