Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture

Not AvailableHand transplanting of vegetable seedlings is always been a time consuming and labourious activity which often leads to muscular fatigue. Use of hitech instrumentation increased to achieve precision and automation in agricultural operations. At present the transplanting is done manually which accounts for large amount of hand labour and time. To ensure precision and timeliness in operation, an automatic transplanting based on embedded system for use in seedling transplanters was developed. The developed system consists of feed roller, pro-tray belt, a pair of L-shaped rotating fingers, embedded system, DC and stepper motor. The plug seedlings were released into the furrow with use of developed embedded system by actuating DC as well as stepper motor. The performances of the developed system was tested rigorously at four different operating speeds (1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 km/h) and three angles of pro-tray feed roller (00, 300, 450) for attaining optimum plant to plant spacing in soil bin. The result indicated that percent transplanting and plant to plant spacing was found optimum at 2.0 km/h forward speed and 300 angle of pro-tray feed roller. The average plant spacing, transplanting efficiency, furrow closer, angle of inclination and miss planting were 600 mm, 91.7%, 90.3%, 18.30 and 2.1%, respectively. The developed system ensures the precision by sigulating the placement of seedlings at optimum spacing for sustainable agriculture production. It also enabled the optimum transplanting rate, the ability to transplant at higher speeds and maintaining proper plant to plant spacing

Microscale Surface Modifications for Heat Transfer Enhancement

In this experimental study, two surface modification techniques were investigated for their effect on heat transfer enhancement. One of the methods employed the particle (grit) blasting to create microscale indentations, while the other used plasma spray coating to create microscale protrusions on Al 6061 (aluminum alloy 6061) samples. The test surfaces were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal scanning laser microscopy. Because of the surface modifications, the actual surface area was increased up to 2.8× compared to the projected base area, and the arithmetic mean roughness value (Ra) was determined to vary from 0.3 μm for the reference smooth surface to 19.5 μm for the modified surfaces. Selected samples with modified surfaces along with the reference smooth surface were then evaluated for their heat transfer performance in spray cooling tests. The cooling system had vapor-atomizing nozzles and used anhydrous ammonia as the coolant in order to achieve heat fluxes up to 500 W/cm2 representing a thermal management setting for high power systems. Experimental results showed that the microscale surface modifications enhanced heat transfer coefficients up to 76% at 500 W/cm2 compared to the smooth surface and demonstrated the benefits of these practical surface modification techniques to enhance two-phase heat transfer process. © 2013 American Chemical Society