Modeling of Soil Compaction Beneath the Tractor Tire using Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks

ماشین های کشاورزی

Article 9, Volume 8, Issue 1 - Serial Number 15, 2018, Pages 105-118   

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: 10.22067/jam.v8i1.58891

Authors

Gh. Shahgholi^* ; H. Ghafouri Chiyaneh; T. Mesri Gundoshmian

Biosystems Engineering Department, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil, Iran

Abstract

Introduction
Soil compaction is one of the most destructive effects of machine traffic. Compaction increases soil mechanical strength and reduces its porosity, plant rooting and ultimately the yield. Nowadays, agricultural machinery has the maximum share on soil compaction in modern agriculture. The soil destruction may be as surface deformation or as subsurface compaction. Any way machine traffic destructs soil structure and as result has unfavorable effect on the yield. Hence, soil compaction recognition and its management are very important. In general, soil compaction is the most destructive effect of machine traffic. Modeling of ecological systems by conventional modeling methods due to the multitude effective parameters has always been challenging. Artificial intelligence and soft computing methods due to their simplicity, high precision in simulation of complex and nonlinear processes are highly regarded. The purpose of this research was the modeling of soil compaction system affected by soil moisture content, the tractor forward velocity and soil depth by multilayer perceptron neural network.
Materials and Methods
In order to carry out the field experiments, a tractor MF285 which was equipped with a three-tilt moldboard plough was used. Experiments were conducted at the Agricultural research field of University of Mohaghegh Ardabili in five levels of moisture content of 11, 14, 16, 19 and 22%, forward velocity of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 km.h^-1, and soil depths of 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 cm as a randomized complete block design with three replications. In this study, perceptron neural network with five neurons in the hidden layer with sigmoid transfer function and linear transfer function for the output neuron was designed and trained.

Results and Discussion
Field experiments showed three main factors were significant on the bulk density (P<0.01). The mutual effect of moisture on depth and mutual binary effect of moisture on velocity and depth on velocity were significant (P<0.01). Mutual triplet effect of moisture on velocity on depth was significant (P<0.05). Maximum bulk density of 1362 kg/m³ was obtained at the highest moisture of 22% and the lowest forward velocity of 1 km/h at the depth of 20 cm. Whilst the minimum value of 1234.5 kg/m³ was related to the moisture, forward velocity and depth of 11%, 5 km/h and depth of 40 cm, respectively. Compaction increased as soil moisture content increased up to 22% which was critical moisture. In contrast, soil compaction decreased as the tractor velocity and soil depth increased. A comparison of neural network output and experimental results indicated a high determination coefficient of R² = 0.99 between them. Also, the mean square error of the model was 0.174, in addition, mean absolute percentage error of the system (MAPE) was equal to %0.29 which showed high accuracy of neural network to model soil compaction.
Conclusion
It was concluded that soil compaction increased as soil moisture content increased up to a critical value. Increasing soil moisture act as lubricant and soil layers compacted together. Hence knowledge of soil moisture can help us to manage soil compaction during agricultural operations. Increasing the tractor forward velocity reduced soil compaction. However, agricultural operations should be conducted at certain speeds to carry out the duty properly and increasing speed more that value decreases the efficiency of work.
Neural network of MLP with 5 neurons in hidden layer and sigmoid function in middle layer and one neuron with linear transfer function was found the most accurate and precise in prediction of the soil bulk density.  A high determination coefficient of R² = 0.99 was found between measured and predicted values.
 

Keywords

Artificial neural network; Modeling; Multilayer perceptron; Soil compaction

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