Design, Construction and Evaluation of an Automatic Wire-bending Machine for Plant Supports

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of Agrotecnology, Aburayhan Compus, Univercity of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Nowadays, the vertical cultivation method is considered because of its high productivity per unit area and improvement of greenhouse products quality Conventional and manual methods are currently being used to produce a variety of plant support forms in vertical planting for greenhouse products. Therefore, construction of the various plant supporting forms using computer numerical control (CNC) technology is very important. In this study, design, construction and evaluation of an automatic wire bending machine is provided to create various plant supporting forms. This machine is including three units such as mechanical, electrical and control-programing units. In the mechanical unit, the rotational-to-linear wire conversion mechanism along with stepper motor and eccentric offset vertical shaft mounted gear were used for transferring and bending of the wires, respectively. Also, the new coordinates were created in the bending process by holding of wire and rotating working plate around the transferring axis for 3-D wire bending. In the electronic unit were used an Arduino board, three stepper motors, three drivers and a DC motor. Subsequently, the machine was controlled by an operator through connecting the electronic unit to a computer followed by sending a move command which this process carried out in Arduino medium. The machine parameters such as frequency at four levels (31, 42, 50 and 61 Hz), the distance of bender to plant support at two levels (1.7 and 2.3 mm), and process time at four levels (5, 7, 8 and 10 second) as independent variables were evaluated on linear and angular displacement as the dependent variables and the performance of constructed machine was compared with a software models. The results showed that in the modeling of various plant supporting forms there was not a significant difference between constructed machine and software models through variation of independent parameters. In general, in this study, the constructed automatic wire bending machine was created the high-precision, high-speed and applicable of the different plant supporting forms, and thereby, it provided optimizing the complex designs for plant growth.

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Main Subjects

References

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Iranian Journal of Biosystems Engineering
Volume 50, Issue 3
November 2019
Pages 683-694

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History

  • Receive Date: 11 November 2018
  • Revise Date: 06 May 2019
  • Accept Date: 20 May 2019

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