Experimental Study on Tensile Properties of Sugarcane Leaves

Abstract. The tensile properties of sugarcane leaves are critical factors affecting the harvesting quality of sugarcane harvesters. Thus, it is meaningful to investigate the tensile properties between sugarcane stalks and leaves. ‘Guitang 128‘ sugarcane and universal testing machine was used for the tensile test in this study. The selected test factors were leaf moisture content and sheath diameter, and the connecting force was selected as test index. The results showed that there was a strong linear correlation between the stalk-leaf connecting force and diameter of leaf sheath, and the connecting force also increased with the increasing moisture content. Then, the load-displacement curve of stalks and leaves was obtained, so that we could get how the tensile force changed during the tensile test. In addition, leaf tensile forces in longitudinal direction were much larger than in transverse direction. Two-way ANOVA revealed that both of the moisture content (A) and sheath diameter (B) had significant influence on the stalk-leaf connecting force (p＜ 0.01), however, the interaction between A and B was not significant (p＞ 0.1). This study was expected to provide a theoretical reference for the design and improvement of crop dividers of sugarcane harvester.