Abstract:Tapping is the key to obtaining natural rubber. Manual rubber tapping is usually encountered in harsh environments, high labor intensity, low efficiency, and a shortage of rubber tapping workers. An automatic rubber-tapping device with spiral movement was designed to solve these problems. Based on theoretical analysis of the tapping track and force analysis of the tapping knife in working, the equation of spiral trajectory was obtained, and the spiral track and gear rail were designed. Then the ADAMS software was used to simulate and analyze the transmission stability of three different gear shapes in the drive shaft and spiral gear rail, and the structure and working parameters of the spiral transmission mechanism were determined. On the strength of the flexible connection method, the pasting and profiling rubber-tapping mechanism was designed. The prototype was tuilt, and an orthogonal test was taken with the factors of transmission shaft speed, tapping thickness, and rubber tree diameter under the indexes of qualification rate of the rubber tapping depth and the tapping surface smoothness. The results showed that the rubber-tapping device had the best tapping performance with a transmission shaft speed of 12.00r/min. While the average qualified rate of the tapping depth was 89.60%, and the average qualification rate of the tapping surface smoothness was 91.19%. Among them, the 200mm diameter rubber trees were the best for rubber tapping with a thickness of 2mm. The average qualification rate of the tapping depth and the tapping surface smoothness were 93.93% and 94.32% under these best parameters, meeting the requirements of tapping work, which can provide a reference for further research of mechanized and automatic rubber tapping devices.