A New Approach for Determination of Seed Distribution Area inVertical Plane

The objective of this study was to develop a new method to evaluate the seed distribution area in vertical plane andcompare it with the other methods. For this purpose, the different calculation methods of seed distribution area namely, standard deviational ellipse, voronoi polygons with delaunay triangulation, integral method, and developed one, the concave hull algorithm was considered and compared in this study. Three different types of no-till seeders equipped with hoe (NS1), single disc (NS2) and winged hoe (NS3) type openers were used and operated at three different tractor forward speeds (0.75 m s^-1, 1.25 m s^-1 and 2.25 m s^-1). According to the results obtained from the study, it was found that the newly developed seed distribution evaluation procedure, concave hull, provided the smaller area values of the distributed seeds as compared to others. The influences of seeders were tested and it was found that the no-till seeder which has disc type furrow opener spread the seeds into larger areas. However, maximum variations of sowing depth values were observed at the no-till seeder with single disc furrow opener. Increasing tractor forward speeds resulted inan increased variation of sowing depth.