Today the fulfilment of tightening emission regulations has led to increased costs for diesel engines. Therefore, the customers of self-propelled forage harvesters expect benefits, especially improvements in fuel efficiency. By using a continuous variable transmission, it is possible to shift the operating points of the engine into regions with lower fuel consumption. KRONE researched the application of a hydrostatic continuous variable drive in the transmission for the crop flow outputs, leaving the cooling system and traction drive unaffected. Machine data collected from customers is used to create a representative spectrum of customer's use cases. Together with detailed measurements of test machines load spectrums can be created. System simulation is used to optimize the Operating Points with regard to the overall system efficiency. Finally, the fuel savings compared to a conventional system are predicted. The simulation results show that a continuous variable drive is able to reduce the fuel consumption about 5%, depending on the customer's profile. These calculations have been verified by preliminary field tests.
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