Mechanical properties of sweet potato vine and stalk during harvest.

Sweet potato is a crop which is drought-resistant, tolerant of poor soil, and owns increasingly enormous potential. It is an important foodstuff, a raw material for starch industry, a kind of health food to prevent cancer and a new raw material for energy as well. The sweet potato planting area in China per year on average is usually 3 667 000 hectares, accounting for 45% of the world's planting area. As sweet potato vines are very long and broomy, the vines must be cleaned up before sweet potatoes are harvested, otherwise are unable to be harvested. Vine crushing and returning machine is usually the dominant form adopted to clean sweet potato vines internationally, but the problems existed in this type of machine were obvious such as low smashing proportion and more stubble residue on the top ridge. New problems have been brought by long stubble such as blocking, larger load and worse smooth working property. Aiming at these problems, the machinery and agronomy should be combined, in order to prove mechanical properties of sweet potato vine and stalk during harvest and working quality of sweet potato vine crushing and returning testing machine. In this paper, the types of fresh purple sweet potato Ningzi 1 and Ningzi 2 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province were regarded as the tested subject, the electronic universal testing machine, electric drying oven with forced convection, and sweet potato vine crushing and returning testing machine etc. were applied, and the change of moisture percentage and shear strength of sweet potato stalk during harvest were studied. The results showed that at the beginning of experience harvest period, when the percentage of moisture were 81.5% and 78.1%, the shear force were 90.1 and 94.8 N, respectively, during 18 testing days the moisture percentage of sweet potato stalk reduced by 14.8% and 13.97%, respectively, but the shear force of stalk increased by 36.3 and 37.5 N respectively, which showed that the moisture percentage of sweet potato stalk was lower and the shear force was larger as the growth time of plants went on. The internal relations between mechanical crushing quality and percentage of moisture, shear strength were revealed: during the testing period of 18 days, the qualified rates of vine's crushing length for sweet potato type Ningzi 1 and Ningzi 2 dropped by 6.3% and 6.7% respectively, stubble length on top ridge increased by 3.6 and 4.4 cm respectively, which showed that with the increasing of the growth period and the rising of stalk's shear force, the working quality of sweet potato vine crushing and returning machine declined. The quadratic function regression equations on the change between shearing force and moisture percentage of the two types of fresh purple sweet potatoes' stalk were obtained with Matlab when the percentage of moisture was 86.92%-70.08%, and the fitting coefficient of determination R² both reached above 0.99. From the point of increasing the quality of mechanical smashing and mechanical work, it was put forward that the most suitable time of mechanical crushing for the two kinds of purple sweet potatoes during harvest was about 6-8 days, which was a relatively short time. The results offer the direct basis for parameter design of new sweet potato vine crushing and returning testing machine such as machine speed, cutter linear velocity, and also provide the important reference for the selection of suitable harvest period and cultivation agronomic research that fits for machinery operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]