Aiming at the problems of low harvesting efficiency and high cost for leafy vegetables, a fully electric vegetable harvester was designed, which takes an electric tractor as the power source and is mainly composed of a cutting device, a reel device, a conveying device, a traveling device, a suspension device, a frame and other components, enabling the harvesting of Brassica rapa var. chinensis (seedling stage, commercially known as “Jimaocai” in Chinese) and other similar crops. On the basis of elaborating the overall structure and working principle, SolidWorks was applied to simplify the models of Brassica rapa var. chinensis and the cutting blade. The Recurdyn software was used to conduct kinematic simulation analysis on the cutting device, clarifying the movement process of the cutting blade. Meanwhile, the EDEM software was adopted to establish a discrete element simulation model for the kinematic simulation and analysis of the process of cutting vegetable stems by the cutting blade. The simulation results showed that the optimal harvesting effect was achieved when the traveling speed of the tractor was 0.691 m/s and the reciprocating cutting frequency of the cutting blade was 25.54 Hz. Considering the field operation efficiency and operational convenience, a traveling speed of 0.7 m/s was adopted in the field verification test with the reciprocating cutting frequency of the cutting blade maintained at 25 Hz. Field verification tests demonstrated that the average harvesting loss rate and the average missing cutting rate of Brassica rapa var. chinensis were 6.7% and 4.3% respectively, and the test results were basically consistent with the simulation results, meeting the design requirements of the vegetable harvester. This equipment is equipped with an ordered harvesting function, which can reduce the subsequent sorting cost, and the research results can provide a theoretical basis for the subsequent test and optimization of fully electric vegetable harvesters.
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