Harvesting machine for kelp culture in floating raft

Kelp is not only a kind of food of sea vegetable for human, but also widely used as raw materials in processing food, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. In China kelp is generally planted on floating raft by using horizontal kelp rope cultivation method and often harvested manually. Harvesting kelp by hand is a difficult process with low production efficiency and high labor intensity. In this paper, a harvesting machine was developed for floating raft culture of kelp. It consists of mainly two locomotion modules, a collection/transmission module and a power module. The structure and working mechanism of this machine was presented and analyzed in detail. The tests of experiments were conducted as well with the developed machine. The manual harvest efficiency is 16.7%; however the mechanized harvest efficiency average value is 35.8%. The harvest time could be reduced by half if the company takes the same people to work. It is proven that the design of the machine is feasible.