Optimal design and experiment on vibratory fruit harvesting mechanism with three-dimensional excitation

Abstract: With the growth of orchard area and fruit yield in recent years, it is still a big problem for farmers to harvest fruit efficiently in China. Because the shaking-type harvester can make mature fruit detached quickly and effectively, the existing fruit harvesters are mostly shaking type. But the efficiency of shaking-type harvester is not high enough. To improve the harvesting efficiency, the three-dimensional shaking method was proposed and the vibratory harvesting mechanism with three-dimensional excitation was designed. Firstly, a Chinese hickory tree model was established for transient dynamics analysis by finite element software (ANSYS). One-dimensional and two-dimensional shaking method was discussed respectively, and then the influence of the loading direction on the acceleration response of tree was analyzed. Simulation results show that the loading direction of these 2 shaking methods has remarkable effect on the acceleration response, but it is difficult to make fruit tree branches produce enough big acceleration response in all directions. So, the three-dimensional shaking method was proposed on the basis of one-dimensional and two-dimensional shaking method, which has effect not only on the cross section direction of fruit tree's branch, but also on the axial direction. After analyzing the acceleration response of different kinds of shaking methods and the three-dimensional displacement patterns with different speed ratios, the conclusions are as follows: 1) Fruit tree shaken by three-dimensional load has a more uniform acceleration than by one-dimensional and two-dimensional load; 2) it has the most uniform acceleration distribution when the speed ratio of crank in the spatial linkage shaking mechanism is 1:1. Secondly, according to the generation method of three-dimensional displacement load and the dynamics simulation result of fruit trees, the vibratory fruit harvesting mechanism with three-dimensional excitation was designed, which mainly consists of the case, the spatial linkage shaking mechanism, the driving mechanism and the clamping mechanism. The transmission ratio of the driving mechanism can be changed to obtain different three-dimensional displacement loads. And the kinematics analysis of the spatial linkage shaking mechanism was performed. Thirdly, after kinematics analysis of the spatial linkage shaking mechanism, the stroke and acceleration that were affected by the change of related parameters were calculated with MATLAB software. In order to achieve the optimization objective of the maximum acceleration, genetic algorithm was used to optimize parameters of this mechanism. The ranges of parameters were determined by constraints of the spatial linkage shaking mechanism. Then the optimization software was based on MATLAB platform and the optimization result indicates that the maximum output acceleration of the mechanism is 117.3 m/s2. A prototype of vibratory fruit harvesting mechanism with three-dimensional excitation was manufactured and assembled according to the result of parameter optimization. Then the dynamics response experiment of fruit tree was carried out. In order to evaluate the performance of the vibratory fruit harvesting mechanism with three-dimensional excitation, an eccentric block type vibration motor was used for comparison in the experiment, and the accelerations of test points on the fruit tree were measured by data acquisition and analysis instrument. Statistics results indicate that the test points on the tree have obvious acceleration response in 3 directions to the vibratory harvester with three-dimensional excitation, while obvious acceleration was only generated at the cross section of the branch by the eccentric block type vibration motor and the acceleration was small along the axis direction of the branch. Finally, the coefficient of variation was calculated according to the average acceleration result of the test points by 2 shaking methods. Results show that it has a smaller coefficient of variation when the tree is excited by the vibratory harvester with three-dimensional excitation, which means the vibratory harvester with three-dimensional excitation can make the branches vibrate in a uniform level. So the harvesting efficiency is expected to be improved with the excitation of few times.