2014 Volume 60 Issue 3 Pages 200-205
The authors designed and manufactured a high-speed and high-precision seed-releasing device that can be mounted on a corn planter that is adaptable to the small (10-30 a) no-tillage fields commonly found in Japan. The device is characterized by two inclined, rotating coaxial discs : separation disc and releasing disc. The separation disc has cells along its circumference that are used for separating seeds one by one, and the releasing disc has pockets along its circumference for releasing the separated seeds. To verify the functionality of the device, it was tested using forage dent corn seeds. The test results confirmed that the separation disc separated seeds one by one from the seed hopper, that the transfer of seeds from the separation disc to the releasing disc was smooth, and that the releasing disc released the transferred seeds from the bottom of the device to the ground in approximately equal intervals. Moreover, the results of performance comparison tests with an existing inclined plate-type seed-releasing device confirmed that the device developed in this study possessed higher accuracy than the existing seed-releasing device.
