Investigation on the Bending Behavior of Tea Stalks Based on Non-Prismatic Beam with Virtual Internodes

Wenchao Wu, Yongguang Hu and Zehui Jiang
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Wenchao Wu: Key Laboratory of Modern Agricultural Equipment and Technology, Ministry of Education Jiangsu Province, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Yongguang Hu: Key Laboratory of Modern Agricultural Equipment and Technology, Ministry of Education Jiangsu Province, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Zehui Jiang: Key Laboratory of Modern Agricultural Equipment and Technology, Ministry of Education Jiangsu Province, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China

Agriculture, 2022, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: The study aims to fully explicate the bending behavior of tea stalks under the condition of large deflection, which is crucial to improve the working performance of mechanized harvesting equipment. The mechanical model of the stalk was assumed to be a non-prismatic beam with virtual internodes that could differ from actual internodes. With the model, the stalk can be freely divided into multiple virtual internodes, whose flexural rigidities can be determined by solving an optimization problem, and deflection curves can be predicted after determining the positions of virtual nodes under given loads. Moreover, a novel method was proposed to obtain the deflection curve of the stalk based on the techniques of binocular vision and non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) curve fitting. The results show that R-squared values of fitted 2nd-degree NURBS curves of bending shape of tea stalks range from 0.9576 to 0.9964, with an average of 0.9797. The results indicate that flexural rigidity decreases from the bottom to the top of the tea stalk, and the deflection curve could be predicted more precisely with the model of piecewise flexural rigidities than that of average flexural rigidity. The study could be applied to the optimization design of the cutter and adaptive adjustment techniques of operational parameters for tea picking machines.

Keywords: flexural rigidity; deflection; non-uniform rational B-spline; optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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