Development of a Control System for a Small Size Seeding-performance Test Rig

Testing a seed drill indoors can save a great amount of time and labour force. Conventional seeding-performance test rigs usually need at least two people to operate it. Thus, a small size test rig with an automatic control system need to be developed. In this research, a control system was designed firstly. After that, rotation speed of seed-metering shaft were simulated by Simulink and the parameters of the control algorithm were obtained. Moreover, an experiment were conducted to calibrate the seed mass discharged in per cycle rotated by seed-metering shaft. According to the experimental results, the average seed mass in per cycle was 12.61 g. In each validating experiment, the value that the theoretical seed mass subtracted the actual one and then divided the theoretical seed mass was seen as the error percentage of seed mass. Furthermore, 100% subtracted the error percentage was viewed as the accuracy of seed mass. The results showed that all accuracies of seed mass were higher than 82%, and the average accuracy of total experiments was 89.12%. Furthermore, t-test results showed that there was not significant difference between the actual seed masses and the theoretical ones. According to the statistical results, we can conclude that the control system can be applied on seeding-performance test rigs with an desirable performance.