Simulation of hydraulic system of the rice transplanter with AMESim software

Rice transplanter is an inevitable advanced technology in agricultural machinery sector. Nowadays, several problems like lower sustainability, brittleness are facing with existing electronic control devices applied in the hydraulic system of rice transplanters. Moreover, mechanized transplanters are gradually decreasing its demand due to the technological gap with developed countries like USA, Japan. Hence, it is emergency to upgrade those mechanized technologies for the longevity of the machine using advanced electronic control devices. At present, performance evaluation of machinery is performed by simulation because of being cost-effective, time-consuming, and required lower labors. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop and simulate a transplanter simulation model using commercial simulation software (AMESim). PID control algorithm was designed for ascending/descending system using matlab/Simulink interfaces. The hydraulic system of rice transplanter (Yanmar YR6D) is composed of the engine, hydrostatic transmission (HST), hydraulic pump, power assisted steering mechanism, horizontal control system, and ascending/descending system. All the parameters of the simulation model are considered with respect to real agricultural machinery and design criteria. It is accounted that the highest displacement of the piston for ascending/descend and horizontal control systems were approximately 0.007 m and 0.07 m, respectively. It is noticed that performance of PID controller was much better than the simulation results. It also found that the efficiency of HST was about 71.82%. In the future study, it is required to develop control algorithm for the horizontal control system of rice transplanter, and also needed field test for the validation of the model.