Designing a telescopic boom for field sprayers

The efficiency of the pesticide applications has become an important issue with the increasing amount of pesticide usage in agriculture around the world. One of the most vital components of the pesticide applications is sprayer. Sprayers are used to spray the pesticides over the target organism homogenously. Sprayer boom is a crucial component of the field sprayers with regards to spraying homogeneity. In order to eliminate the yawn and roll moments on the sprayer booms, the design of those components is crucial. For that reason, a sprayer boom consists of 5 parts that holds 24 flat fan nozzles, telescopically foldable was designed. Materials used in the boom design are St-37 welded square and St-52 bended sheet metal. The relative motion of the boom parts is provided by wheels that are beared with radial ball bearings. The propulsion is created with the rack-pinion mechanism and a DC motor. In order to examine the strength of the design, statical structural analysis are carried out in Solidworks-Simulation module by using Finite Elements Method (FEM). All boom parts, wheels and boom-chassis support points are investigated individually. All forces affected on the boom parts both on X-Y and Y-Z planes are calculated with the help of the free-body diagrams. Support points, gravity and external forces are applied before the analysis carried out. Then, meshes are created. After the mesh creation, the analysis are carried out and Von-Mises stress and displacement graphs are created. According the graphical results, critical zones on the boom parts are identified and design improvement are performed when necessary. Finally, bolt shear stresses and bearing fatigue are calculated. After the design and structural analysis, the boom was manufactured in a workshop