Abstract:To replace the high-intensitive manual paving work of substrate for elevated cultivation，an automatic mobile paver was developed. This paver can realize the integration operation of inter-row substrate transporting, in-bin upward discharging, double-sided blanking and evenly paving. It was found by measurement that inter-row road was too narrow to vehicle driving. And both width of inter-row road and height of elevated cultivation bed had fairly big errors, so profiling paving operation was necessary. It was found from test of substrate flow characteristic that static accumulation angle of the substrate was about 37° and the sliding angle was about 40°, it was easy to cause conical piling in binning operation, arching in in-bin discharging operation and blocking when filling into bed. Therefore, an integrated automatic mobile substrate paver with tiny telecontrolled intervention was developed to fulfill the task of mobile double-sided floating paving operation for elevated cultivation. The in-bin L-type scraper upward discharging unit, double-sided floating blanking unit, bed-edge profiling paving unit and other key components were designed, and parameter optimization of key components, parameter matching and motion coordination of different components were performed. Test results indicated that this prototype can enter the inter-row road and start mobile double-sided paving by remote control, and then perform all coordinated actions automatically. It can guarantee the compensation of 100mm height error and 40mm width error of cultivation bed in double-sided profiling paving, and the working efficiency reached 330m2/h. Relative errors of in-bed substrate depth were 7.72%, 6.75%, 9.33% and 9.66%, respectively, and substrate depth difference among four beds was only 2.01mm, which indicated that equational and stable paving was achieved. This development may provide a good equipment support for mechanized production of elevated cultivation.
