Design and Experimental Study of a Wine Grape Covering Soil-Cleaning Machine with Wind Blowing

• Main Authors: Qizhi Yang, Mingsheng He, Guangyu Du, Lei Shi, Xiaoqi Zhao, Aiping Shi, Min Addy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
• Series: AgriEngineering
• Subjects: wind blowing; covering soil-cleaning machine; soil discrete particle group; dynamics simulation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2624-7402/3/1/4

Due to the cold and dry climate during the winter season of Central Asia, in order to prevent frostbite and vines drying out for wine grapes, the common methods are burying the vines in winter under a thick layer of soil and then cleaning them out in the next spring. The design of existing vine digging machinery is not precise enough and can only remove the outer layer of the soil on both sides and the top. It cannot clean the soil from the central area of the buried vine. Sometimes, the branches and buds get damaged due to uneven driving condition. To solve the problem, an innovative non-contact blower was designed and tested to clean the vine. In this paper, the design specifications and operation parameters of the blower were determined according to the agronomic properties of the grapevines. Fluent-EDEM coupling, that is, with the help of Engineering discrete element method (EDEM) and CFD fluid simulation software Fluent, was the most common method for dynamic simulation of gas-solid two-phase flow. The Fluent-EDEM coupling simulation was used to simulate the dynamics of soil particles under the action of different wind speeds and blowing patterns, with the goal of a high soil cleaning rate. A prototype of the soil cleaning blower was manufactured and tested at the vineyards of Ningxia Yuquanying Farm in China. The results showed that the blower had an operation efficiency of 4669 m^2·h⁻¹, with an average soil removal rate of 80%. The efficiency of covering soil cleaning and rattan raising was greatly improved, and the damage rate of the vines, branches and the buds was greatly reduced.