Modelagem e simulação de um afofador para arranquia de mandioca

Abstract

One of the methods for harvesting cassava, a plant used both as food and as a raw material in the industry, is the manual. However, since this is a tiring activity and requires a lot of manpower, cassava uprooters were developed. These are agricultural implements developed to break up the soil and raise the roots of the plant, in order to make harvesting less laborious. Since few academic works have been developed on the equipment, in the present work a survey of the constructive parameters of the active organs of subsoilers in general was carried out to, then, define the values that would bring more advantages to a cassava uprooter. With these values in mind, and with the aid of a CAD tool, a 3D modeling of the shank, connecting plate and wing of a cassava uprooter was carried out. Then, with the support of a CAE tool, the value of 25kN, estimated for the draft force, was applied to the wing in order to determine the structural strength of the implement, which resulted in a safety factor of 2.2. Additionally, in view of the inevitable wear of the material due to abrasion with the ground, new simulations were carried out to verify the variation of the safety factor of the wing as the thickness was reduced. Thus, for a wing with an initial thickness of 1" and a safety factor of 4.5, when making reductions of 5%, 10%, 25% and 40% in its thickness, new safety factors of 3.98, 3.57, 2.49 and 1.6 were obtained, respectively, demonstrating that even with a high degree of wear, the designed active organ would still be able to resist the applied traction load.