TESTS OF A SEEDER AND FERTILIZER MACHINE WITH A MECHATRONIC SYSTEM ADAPTED TO CONTROL THE DISPENSERS

Abstract

The sowing-fertilizing machines used in the mexican field use mechanical systems to drive the feeders. In developed countries, these systems are being replaced by mechatronic systems applied in variable dosing machines. Mechatronic systems have the advantage that their performance is not affected by the conditions of the soil and vegetation cover, in addition to the ease of making changes in the dose of input supplies, by allowing them to be carried out continuously and in real time. However, they have the disadvantage of their high acquisition cost. This study presents the laboratory test results of a mechatronic system developed with low-cost free hardware and software, and adapted to the Model LC-U-N seeder-fertilizer from the manufacturer Sembradoras del Bajío S. A de C. V. The seed dispenser was tested to the standard of the corn seed greased belt described in ISO 7256-1:1984. The results show good seed distribution quality at rotation frequencies of the seed disk of 0.524 to 2,199 rad s^-1, obtaining feeding quality indexes ≥ 90%, seed loss and multiplicity less than 6 % and precision <18 %. The fertilizer and pesticide dispensers were tested based on the mexican standard NMX-O-222-SCFI-2004, with commercial UREA fertilizer, using five rotation frequencies in the range of 0.524 to 3.77 rad s^-1 and 1047 to 14,661 rad s^-1, respectively, with different openings of the outlet gate. In the case of the fertilizer dispenser, an application dose of 3 to 562 kg ha-1 was obtained with the best performance when using gate openings ≤ 50 %, while the pesticide dispenser presented excellent performance, with which it was obtained an application rate of 0.004 to 16.4 kg ha^-1.