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

Increased harvesting speed has been carried out to increase the productivity required by the harvesting fleet to manage sugarcane-industry cost pressures. Whilst the power and processing throughput of the harvesters have been able to meet this requirement easily, 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 contribute to cane loss during harvesting and contribute to poor ratoon performance often seen through the industry, impacting on the ratoon cycle economics. Previous experimental investigations dated more than 25 years and recent experimental work has shown that a great deal of damage is 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, to Brazil, where the 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 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 the adoption of improved designs.