The object of this study was evaluation of a walking tractor drawn peanut harvester at different conditions of soil moisture content and forward speed and comparing it with manual harvesting. The evaluation factors for peanut harvester were two levels of soil moisture content and three levels of forward speed. The results revealed that the effect of soil moisture content was only significant on...

A tremendous amount of research has been performed on the design and analysis of vibration energy harvester architectures with the goal of optimizing power output; most studies assume idealized input vibrations without paying much attention to whether such idealizations are broadly representative of real sources. These “idealized input signals” are typically derived from the expected nature of ...

sugarcane mite, oligonychus sacchari mcgregor, is one of the most important pests of sugarcane plant in khuzestan province, southwest of iran. during a two-year study (2007-2008), the biology of the sugarcane mite, o. sacchari, was investigated on three commercial varieties cp48-103, cp57-614 and cp69-1062 under laboratory conditions (temperature 30±1° c, rh% 60±5 and a photoperiod of 16:8 (l:d...

OBJECTIVE To assess health-related quality of life in sugarcane cutters. METHODS Longitudinal study conducted in a sugar and ethanol plant located in the western region of the State of São Paulo (Southeastern Brazil) from April (pre-harvest) to October (harvest) 2010. A total of 44 sugarcane cutters, smokers and non-smokers, was evaluated in three periods: pre-harvest, at the end of the third...

The recent development of genetically modified sugarcane, with the aim of commercial production, requires an understanding of the potential risks of increased weediness of sugarcane as a result of spread and persistence of volunteer sugarcane. As sugarcane is propagated vegetatively from pieces of stalk and the seed plays no part in the production cycle, the fate of seed in the environment is y...

A control law for an electromagnetic vibration energy harvester is derived using the maximum power transfer theorem. Using regenerative electronics, the controller cancels the reactive portion of the harvester’s impedance by eliminating the effect of mechanical inertia and stiffness elements, and the coil’s electrical inductive element. The result is an energy harvester approach that captures m...

In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (RGV), values of maize and cottonseed crops are significantly reduced by aflatoxin contamination. Aflatoxin contamination of susceptible crops is the product of communities of aflatoxin producers and the average aflatoxin-producing potentials of these communities influence aflatoxin contamination risk. Cropping pattern influences community composition and, ther...

This paper compares performance of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester, in terms of output power, under different types of vibration. The most common method used to characterize a vibration energy harvester is to excite the energy harvester under a sinusoidal vibration of its resonant frequency and measure the voltage across certain electrical loads. However, in practical applications, t...