الفهرس 
Title : Development and evaluation of the performance of a vegetable tray seeder
ContentsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Vegetable seeds are small in volume, light in weight. Manual indenting and sowing of small vegetable seeds in plug trays is a slow and labor-intensive operation, which limits the production capacities of vegetable nurseries in Egypt. Based on the physical properties of cucumber and tomato seeds were determined, a prototype pneumatic seeder was designed, fabricated and tested the performance for sowing cucumber and tomato seeds in plug trays.The seeder could make indents in one row of cells in a plug tray and simultaneously place single seeds in the indented cells.The seeder was depended on a controlled vacuum pressure passed through a set of holes to pick up and DROP the seeds into the tray cells. The seeder was evaluated under two trays types of 84 and 209 cells, four different vacuum pressure levels (6, 8, 10, and 12 kPa) & (1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 kPa) and four different hole diameters (0.76, 1.00, 1.20 and 1.40 mm) & (0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1.0 mm) for cucumber and tomato seeds respectively.The performance of the seeder was evaluated using seed singulation efficiency, and seeding efficiency with different drum speeds of (0.06 ,0.08, 0.10, and 0.12 m s-1) and seed hopper vibrator or without.The developed machine is suitable with two types of trays without changing the seeding drum