Mesoscopic analysis of drag reduction performance of bionic furrow opener based on the discrete element method

Guomin Liu; Jiuyuan Yao; Zhen Chen; Xuekai Han; Meng Zou

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0293750

Mesoscopic analysis of drag reduction performance of bionic furrow opener based on the discrete element method

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 3;18(11):e0293750. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293750. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Guomin Liu¹, Jiuyuan Yao², Zhen Chen², Xuekai Han¹, Meng Zou²

Affiliations

¹ College of Civil Engineering, Jilin Jianzhu University, Changchun, China.
² Key Laboratory of Bionic Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, China.

Abstract

In order to study the dynamic interface mechanical behavior between soil and agricultural machinery and reveal the causes of tillage resistance, three kinds of bionic furrow opener were designed according to the characteristics of earthworm head surface curve, using the discrete element method to simulate and analyze the process of the furrow openers. The results showed that the order of ditching resistance from large to small is traditional opener, bionic corrugated opener, bionic ridgeline opener, bionic composite opener. With the same ditching speed, the drag reduction effect of the three bionic openers increases with the increase of the ditching depth. During the process of increasing the depth from 30 mm to 60 mm and 90 mm, the ditching resistance of the traditional opener increased from 11.56 N to 28.32 N and 48.61 N as well as the maximum drag reduction ratio increased from 5.58% to 7.20% and 8.93% for the bionic composite opener. With the same ditching depth, the bionic composite opener reached the highest drag reduction rate of all bionic openers when the speed is 100 mm/s, the value is 9.08%. The width of the ditch of the three bionic openers is smaller than that of the traditional opener. Bionic corrugated opener can improve the ditch height and reduce the ditch width,the corrugated structure creates a gap between the surface of the core and the particles, reducing the number of contact and contact area of the particles. The number of contact particles of the three bionic openers is smaller than that of the traditional opener. The bionic composite opener has the smallest force field and the soil disturbance caused by the core share surface is small, the soil is evenly distributed along the core surface. The discrete element simulation shows that the bionic opener can effectively reduce the ditching resistance and improve the quality of ditching, which provides a theoretical basis for subsequent research and optimization.

Copyright: © 2023 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Agriculture
Bionics*
Computer Simulation
Soil*

Substances

Soil

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51405191 and No. 52075217). For both Grant No. 51405191 and No. 52075217, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.