Abstract:
The uprightness control in the process of garlic mechanized sowing was the core technical difficulty to improve planting quality and yield. The traditional duckbill sowing device became a key bottleneck in the development of garlic mechanized sowing technology due to its structural defects, which resulted in a lack of uprightness of the garlic seeds during sowing. In this study, we explored an effective method to improve the stability of garlic‐seed uprightness through innovative structural modifications, in order to address the collapse of seeds triggered by the failure of the inner‐wall support during the opening process of the traditional duckbill. We focused on solving the following core problems: quantitatively analyzing how pre‐added soil influenced the attitude stability of garlic seeds; constructing a dynamic interaction model of soil–device–seed under the new opening structure; verifying the optimization effect of different structural parameters on sowing quality; and providing theoretical support for the research and development of precision garlic sowing equipment. Based on the discrete element method (EDEM 2021), we constructed an interaction model containing soil, the duckbill device, and Cangshan garlic cloves. We employed the Hertz–Mindlin (no slip) contact model and inter‐particle parallel bonding to simulate the cohesion and other properties of spherical soil particles, and we set the particle‐size distribution to 0.5-2 mm. The study adopted a two-stage experimental design. In the first stage, we systematically analyzed how the percentage height of garlic seeds buried in pre-added soil (five gradients: 0, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) affected their attitude. In the second stage, we designed two types of perforated structures—Transverse and Longitudinal—to investigate the regulation mechanism of soil inflow by varying hole width (6.5 mm), hole length (30 and 25 mm for the Transverse structure, 40 mm for the Longitudinal structure), and other parameters. Finally, we built a bench‐test system based on a high-speed camera and quantitatively analyzed the test data via image processing. The simulation and bench‐test data showed that pre-added soil had a significant regulatory effect on seed stability. In virtual simulation, when the pre-burial rates were 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%, the average decreases in seed uprightness were 33°, 22°, 10°, 4°, and 3°, respectively, with the rate of decrease diminishing as the pre-burial rate increased. In the bench-top validation, the corresponding decreases were 38°, 26°, 13°, 6°, and 4°. Notably, at pre-burial rates than 75%, the decrease in uprightness tended to stabilize under both conditions. Regarding structural optimization, the Transverse perforated design (top hole 30 mm, bottom hole 25 mm) achieved an 87.5% pre-burial rate at a 6.5 mm hole width, while the Longitudinal perforated design (hole length 40 mm) achieved 77.5%. Bench-top measurements confirmed actual pre-burial rates of 80% (transverse) and 72% (longitudinal). Compared with the traditional non-perforated structure, the Transverse perforated device improved seed uprightness by 59.27%, and the Longitudinal by 44.05%, closely matching theoretical predictions. The localized perforated duckbill structure we proposed effectively solved the support‐failure problem during the opening stage of the traditional device by introducing a controllable soil‐compensation mechanism. Theoretical analysis and experimental validation demonstrated that the two-segment Transverse perforated design improved seed-clove uprightness by 59.27%. These results provided a new technical path for profiling mechanisms in precision garlic sowing equipment and offered important engineering value for advancing mechanized planting technology of economic crops.