New progress in optimizing mechanical rubber cutting strategies for rubber trees

2024-02-27

Recently, the mechanical equipment and automation team of the Rubber Institute of the Chinese Academy of Thermal Sciences has made new progress in optimizing the cutting strategy of rubber tree machinery. This study elucidates a new rubber tree mechanical rubber cutting device and analyzes the optimization strategy of integrating the design of key cutting components of rubber tree rubber cutting machinery with rubber cutting agronomic technology, providing an important theoretical basis for the innovative research and development of intelligent rubber cutting equipment.

Rubber cutting is an important way to harvest latex. Traditional manual rubber cutting technology is highly specialized and difficult, with high labor intensity. In the past decade, the research and development of mechanical rubber picking equipment has become an important direction to break the constraints of the industry. Based on the key technology of "exploration strategy control" for intelligent harvesting of natural rubber, this study proposes a mechanical cutting device with a combination of vertical blade and adjustable guide. The handheld rubber cutting machine is used as the experimental body, and the response surface method (RSM) and center combination rotation design (CCRD) optimization methods are adopted. The blade vertical blade height, cutting force, and cutting spiral angle are used as influencing factors, and the old rubber line cutting rate, cutting time, and The initial rubber discharge speed and average cutting current were taken as response values, and the optimization plan was determined. By comparing the effectiveness of traditional manual rubber cutting, the effectiveness of the optimized mechanical rubber cutting strategy was preliminarily verified using bark thickness, bark consumption, initial latex speed, cutting time, ash content, and rubber cutting depth as evaluation indicators. The rubber tree mechanical rubber cutting strategy proposed in this study is expected to be applied in the design of related products such as fixed rubber cutting machines and self-propelled rubber cutting robots, which will help improve rubber cutting efficiency and promote the intelligent development of rubber industry harvesting equipment.

The research findings were published in Forests under the title "An optimization study on a novel mechanical rubber tree tapping mechanism and technology". Associate researcher Wang Lingling from the Institute of Rubber, Chinese Academy of Thermal Sciences is the first author of this paper, while Associate researcher Zheng Yong from the Institute of Rubber and agronomist Huang Jiajian from the Institute of Information Science are the co corresponding authors of this paper. This study was jointly funded by the Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation High level Talent Project (522RC788) and the National Key R&D Program Project (2020YFD1000602).

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