Fuel Economy Analysis of Corn Combine Harvesters inField Operation

摘要

Studies have shown that the development of combine technologies is tending to meet a balance between higher productivity and lower consumption of machines. To seek another approach which is different from making improvement in engine manufacturing technologies, this reported research analyzed statistically the fuel consumption of two combine harvesters while performing a typical corn harvesting operation, and made a curve-fitting to engines' load characteristics. The results showed that the average of Specific Fuel Consumption (SFC) by those two combines was 98.7% of the rated SFC, with a wide variation rate range from 49.1% to 377.7%. This study revealed that keeping a higher power utilization could be a more effective way to improve engine fuel economy, when it indicated that the influencing factors to fuel economy were harvesting speed, yield distribution, vehicle weight and unloading. Further study is needed to search for the controllability of machine fuel economy corresponding to the identified most influencing factors.