Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Departmental Honors

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

In the Fall of 2024, our farm in Idaho upgraded our equipment from conventional seeding drills to more modern and sophisticated air seeder drills, particularly the John Deere 1900 Commodity Air Cart and John Deere 730 Air Disk Drill. In our case, this equipment was purchased used at an auction and had been a little modified. One modern convenience that this certain 730 Drill did not come with was a blockage monitoring system to alert the operator that a seed distribution tube was no longer distributing seeds. My question the became: Can an affordable, reliable airflow sensor system be designed and installed to detect blockages in an air hose on this John Deere drill? As an engineer, the answer is yes, which then led to my next question: what is the most effective sensor type (mechanical, thermal, pressure differential ect.) for real-time blockage detection in this application?

After some consideration, I determined that a mechanical switch would work best for this application. Upon further research, I settled on using an AFS-222 airflow switch. The simplicity of this instrument was desirable in that it already came with the eletrical switch and diaphragm on which it operates. It is also preferable because it is not only adjustable but also outputs only whether or not the sufficient amount of airflow is flowing. Due to these reasons, it would be a cheaper, low maintenance, reliable system that can be easily retrofitted to our current needs.

I built a prototype model out of PVC pipe and a borrowed blow dryer before going out to the farm to test the system on the equipment itself. Both tests worked successfully, indicating that my design can be implemented for a cost less than that of the typical system sold at dealerships.

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Faculty Mentor

Zac Humes

Departmental Honors Advisor

Nick Roberts

Capstone Committee Member

Grant Cardon