Original Articles
22 August 2025
Early Access
Design and experimental study of bionic digging shovel based on vole’s front middle toe
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All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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To reduce the drag encountered by the potato harvester during excavation in wet soil, a bionic digging shovel was designed based on the vole's front middle toe. By using MATLAB software to extract and fit the information of the contour curve of the vole's front middle toe, the bionic digging shovel model was designed and established. A comparative experiment was conducted on the vole-imitating digging shovel, Gryllotalpa-imitating digging shovel, and common digging shovel in EDEM software, to verify that the vole-imitating digging shovel has drag reduction capability. Through single- and multi-factor simulation analysis, the structural and operational parameters of the vole-imitating digging shovel were optimized. The excavation drag of three types of shovels was compared through field experiments, and the correctness of the simulation results was verified. The results show that the optimal parameter combinations of the vole-imitating digging shovel, i.e., a single shovel width of 135 mm, an entry angle of 20°, and a forward speed of 0.5 m/s. Under the same working conditions, the vole-imitating digging shovel has a better drag reduction effect and a higher soil breakage efficiency than the other two shovels.
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Citations
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Supporting Agencies
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Zhenjiang Key R&D ProjectHow to Cite
“Design and experimental study of bionic digging shovel based on vole’s front middle toe” (2025) Journal of Agricultural Engineering [Preprint]. doi:10.4081/jae.2025.1831.
Copyright (c) 2025 the Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
