The incremental development of a collapsible aerial module for the management of the calamity generated by soil drought

Extended areas of the planet are experiencing drought, a natural phenomenon that occurs due to a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall or when water is insufficient. Drought is a critical global problem affecting the environment, economies and social well-being of communities around the world, with severe impacts on agriculture, wildlife, water supplies and public health.The most efficient technique for protecting the soil against pedological drought is represented by mulching, a technique that enables the preservation of the soil moisture (by reducing evaporation) and limitation of the weed growth (lack of light forces etiolation and exhaustion). In addition, considering that an extraordinary variety of living beings could be developed under the mulch, the most important being represented by the Oligochaeta taxon and Annelida family, through mulching, digging and loosening operations are eliminated.The paper presents the stages of the incremental iterative development of a collapsible aerial module used for mulching the soil affected by extreme pedological drought, starting from the specific requirements imposed to the functional system by the real conditions of usage. The phases of iterative development were completed, starting from the digital and experimental design, the realization and testing of the system. Thus, the initialization phase included the digitization sequences corresponding to the digital design of the system and performance evaluation through testing (sketcher, part design, assembly design and generative structural analysis) for 3 distinct requirements: i) the module has a load with a mass of 5000 kg, t0=0 s; ii) part of the load is placed and there is a remaining part of 2000 kg, t1=t0+ɛ s, and iii) the module is empty, t2= t0+ɛ+ɤ s. The testing was carried out for all the 3 different situations as a function of time and the deformation under the effect of dynamic pressure, Von Mises stress fields and distribution of displacement vectors and errors were visualised.The possible cracks of the system were predicted using the Von Mises criterion, according to which the limit state of the solid body appears when the specific potential energy that modify the shape reaches the characteristic limit value of the material (allowable resistance of min +010N_m2). The second phase of the incremental development consists in the experimental design with the help of the Optitex Pattern Making PDS (EFI Optitex) software, obtaining the type-dimensions of the system and the multiplication (2D pattern construction, 3D simulation and visualization).The incremental development approach leads to a rapid development and realization of the functional model used in the case of pedological drought, and its systematic testing in real conditions of usage will determine both the improvement of the type-dimensional parameters, and the definition of the technological process.