Design and fabrication of automatic corn sowing machine

Abstract

The objective of this research is for design and fabrication an automatic corn-seed-dropping machine controlled by a programmable logic controller. The machine consists of 2 soil tanks and a corn-seed-dropping unit for 50 pits of a 25x54x5 centimeters planting tray. The machine’s operation begins with that the conveyer moves the first planting tray to the underneath of the first soil tank. This soil tank is vibrated by a motor to release approximately 30 - 40 grams of soil into the tray as the first layer soil. Then the tray moves to a corn-seed dropping unit which drops 3 - 4 corn seeds into each pit. After that, the tray moves to the underneath of the second soil tray which release 30 - 40 grams of soil for cover the seeds and completes the operation. According to the test of 10 rounds of continuously automatic operation, the efficiency is 94.87 percentages, and the operation runs smoothly. The average productivity is 1 tray per minute. From the engineering economic evaluation compared with human labor, the break event point is at 1,200 trays. Payback period is 2 months. The operation of the machine is 2 times faster than that of labor.