Compaction properties of forage crops for volumetric throughput measurement in forage harvesters

摘要

Yield mapping is a major component of precision farming. In contrast to the yield mapping available on the market in combine harvesters, yield mapping in forage harvesters is still in the research and development stage. The principles known from the specialist literature are based either on measuring the mass flow or the volume flow. The subject of this paper is improvement of the measuring accuracy of the principle of measuring the feed roll displacement in forage harvesters by taking into account the material behaviour of typical forage crops (forage rye, pasture grass, spring barley, silo maize). On the basis of compaction experiments under defined laboratory conditions, regression equations are drawn up which can be applied to describe the material behaviour for the pressure area up to 3.5 bar. The result is a universally applicable algorithm for more accurate throughput measurement, which can be realised in the on-board computers of modem forage harvesters.