Design of Measuring Method and Instrument for Agricultural Soil Surface Roughness

Abstract. Soil is the vital element for human survival and development. As one of the indicators of soil, soil surface roughness (SSR) plays an important role in agricultural especially for the study of seed bed preparation machine, seed soil depth, soil erosion and irrigation. However, the contact measurement as the common method has many demerits such as low efficiency, high deviation rate and labor intensity. To improve the efficiency and quality of SSR measurement in agriculture, this article analyzed some common SSR measuring methods and brings the noncontact measure idea into design. Then a new calculation method for agricultural SSR had been worked out which could reflect it appropriately in quantification index. For this calculation method, an instrument which takes microcontroller technology and ultrasonic wave ranging technology had been designed. Comparing tests indicate that the instrument could increase measuring efficiency by 21.6% and also could acquire reliable data in most measuring environment. It shows that ultrasonic technic has a good perspective in the SSR measuring.