Modelling the harvester’s front end to reduce billet and stool damage

Increased harvesting speed has been carried out to provide the large increases in productivity required by the harvesting fleet to manage sugarcane-industry cost pressures. Whilst the power and processing throughput of the harvesters has been able to easily meet this requirement, the design of the ‘front end’ of the harvesters has undergone relatively little functional change since their initial development over 50 years ago. The harvesting interactions between the harvester’s “front end” components and the cane plant and the resulting damage are seen to contribute to cane loss during harvesting, as well as being a contributor to poor ratoon performance often seen through the industry, impacting on ratoon cycle economics. Previous experimental investigations dated more than 25 years and recent experimental work have shown that there is a great deal of damage caused to the stalk and the stool by the current designs and operation of sugar cane harvesters. Due to the relatively small size of the Australian sugarcane industry, the manufacture of most new harvesters moved overseas, for example Brazil, where damage caused during harvesting has received little attention, and therefore little focus. Recent attempts have been made to understand and improve the interactions between harvester front-end components and the cane plant with respect to damage caused by the gathering, knockdown and base-cutting operations. As part of this work, a modelling tool using the Finite Element Modelling (FEM) software LS-DYNA was developed to assist in visualizing what happens during the gathering, bending and cutting processes at the front end of the harvester. The task was to predict deformations, stresses and forces in order to improve the design of the front of cane harvesters, in order to reduce stalk and stool damage and improve feeding and throughput. To aid in the modelling, a large number of cane parameter values were extracted from previous experimental data and are reported. In summary, the current paper provides information on improved modelling of the interactions of sugarcane with the front end of harvesters, in order to add further capability to existing calculations, visualize and hopefully facilitate adoption of improved designs.