Air Flow Simulation and Optimization for Negative Pressure Safflower Harvesting Device

ABSTRACT

The safflower collection device is an important service part of safflower harvesting device, the number of the air outlets and external structure of air collecting hood are the main factors influencing the effect of the flower’s petals harvesting and collection. However, the design of pneumatic safflower harvest device is based on experience, resulting in long the design cycle, thus increasing the cost of design. Combined with the advantages of computational fluid dynamics software FLUENT, and the internal flow field of safflower closed style cover flowers as the research object, this paper designed gas collecting hood structures with different number of outlets through the analysis of the airflow distribution and motion law. The result of numerical simulation of gas-collecting hood with trapezoidal cone shows higher air flow speed with no low velocity zone, and the distribution of flow field of safflower collected cover with trapezoid cone type is better than that of parabolic type structure. Based on result of simulation, improved the design of the external shape of flowers cover and designed trapezoid cone type to improve the internal airflow state, thus could achieve the goal of improving efficiency of picking and collecting and reduce energy consumption.

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