Operational Consumption of fuel of a sugar cane harvester

Abstract

Studies have shown that using higher operational capacity harvesters render less fuel consumption per harvested area and, as a result, less operating expenses. This paper aims to obtain the effective fuel consumption per hour of the CASE IH A4000 harvester during the mechanical harvest of raw sugar cane. The study took place in a sugar cane plantation with mechanical harvest in an area belonging to a producer for Coagro (Cooperativa Agroindustrial do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Ltda.) (Agroindustrial Cooperative of the State of Rio de Janeiro), in the municipality of Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro/Brazil. The variety of sugar cane was evaluated at RB867515 in its third cut. The system of automatic data acquisition was built from a volumetric flow sensor to determine the fuel flow, in addition to a data collector (Datalogger) and a global positioning system (GPS) device. To determine the fuel consumption per hour, data from the fuel flow sensor were used. The consumption per hour of fuel was 33.9 L.h-1. The effective consumption was estimated in 1.84 L. ton-1. The consumption per hour and the effective consumption of the CASE IH A4000 were more than double of what the manufacturers stipulated, which means, the consumption is much higher than desirable.