Green tobacco sickness is an illness associated with nicotine exposures among tobacco harvesters. Agricultural workers manually harvest tobacco and thus have the potential for skin exposure to nicotine, particularly on the hands. Often gloves are not worn as it hinders the harvesters' ability to harvest the tobacco leaves. The purposes of this study were to measure the concentration of nicotine...

Combine harvesters have a very important task in grain crop harvesting. Combine harvesters must fulfil lot of technological requirements regarding the field conditions, crop type, as well as the quality performance and optimal costs. The problem is that it is the main harvesting technology of cereals in the world and it has seasonal character of work, which has to be done in a relatively short ...

A field experiment was conducted to determine effects of concentration and spray volume of metsulfuron-methyl as an abscission aid for mechanical harvesting of citrus. Concentrations of 1, 2, and 4 mg·L metsulfuron-methyl were applied to ‘Hamlin’ orange [Citrus sinensis (L.) Osbeck] trees at 470, 1900, and 4700 L·ha (0.5 to 19 g·ha a.i.). Effective fruit loosening was achieved with all applicat...

This paper reports the application of different analytical tools to a basic continuous conditioning (CC) circuit for electrostatic vibration energy harvesters (e-VEHs). We address the fundamental issues of this conditioning circuit and give design advice that enhances the performance of e-VEHs employing this circuit. This circuit is widely used for harvesters with or without an electret layer. ...

Mechanized harvesting of crops is very important in the field agricultural engineering, then brush a common way. The comb device divided into four types: tooth type, roller spring finger belt and rod type. picking rate breakage are indexes to evaluate effect devices. How improve reduce damage great significance popularization To rate, design teeth should conform growth characteristics crops. In...

Insects, such as stinkbugs, are able to produce noxious defence chemicals to ward off predators, nevertheless, some ethnic groups have recipes to render them delicious. We provide an example of edible stinkbugs (Encosternum delegorguei) used by two locally separate ethnic groups in South Africa, the Vhavenda and Mapulana, with a third group, the Bolobedu using them for commercial purposes. Stru...

This paper presents a new energy-harvesting system with two identical piezoelectric energy harvesters in a tandem configuration. Each harvester consists of a piezoelectric beam and a circular cylinder. Experiments are performed to investigate the energy-harvesting performances of this system in water. It can be found that their energy-harvesting performances are all different from that of the s...

Ease of miniaturization, and less or no maintenance, among other advantages, have pushed towards replacement of conventional batteries with energy harvesters in particular, vibratory energy harvesters. In the recent years, nonlinearity has been intentionally introduced into the otherwise linear energy harvesters in the hope of increasing the frequency bandwidth and power density. However, funda...

In this study, we fabricated piezoelectric energy harvesters composed of lead-free (K,Na)NbO3 (KNN) thin films and compared the power generation performance with PZT-thin film energy harvesters. Both of the piezoelectric thin films were deposited on Pt/Ti/Si cantilevers by rf-sputtering. The KNN and PZT thin films had perovskite structure, and showed the relative dielectric constants of 744 and...