Development of an Automatic Soil Hardness Measuring System Mountable on Agricultural Tractors

In this study an automatic soil hardness measuring system mountable on agricultural tractors was developed to improve the accuracy of manual soil hardness testers by a constant penetrating rate, right direction of the cone-penetrometer and the isolation of vibration from the operator. This was necessary to supply similar experimental condition for performance test of new model and comparative experiment. The results of the study are summaried as follows; 1. The system consisted of a sensing part of soil hardness, a driving part of the measuring system and an attaching part between the tractor and the measuring system. 2. The allowable limit value of the system developed was set to 392N to protect from breaking the serve motor and the coupling used in this system. 3. The driving shaft penetrated into soil by 0.3m to measure soil hardness. The soil hardness was measured at the depth of 0.3m from the soil surface but the penetrating work was stopped and the driving shaft was pulled out to protect the system when the value of the soil hardness was too big on foreign substances like stones or straws. 4. Two values measured by automatic measuring system developed in this research and manual penetrometer were compared by statistics hypothesis testing method. When two people measured the soil hardness at the depth of 0.1 and 0.15m by manual cone penetrometer, there was no relationship between two values by two people but the values at the same depths by automatic measuring system developed showed similarity. The automatic system, therefore, developed in this research was proper for measuring soil hardness.

트랙터 부착형 자동 토양경도 측정 시스템 개발