International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

The cultivation of short rotation coppice (SRC) such as poplar and willow on agricultural land is of increasing interest for farmers. But high investment costs, high processing costs, low flexibility of the machines as well as high machine weights are problems, which hinder an extensive implementation. Therefore, the development of a simple and low weight mower-chipper was started. The chipper was designed for mounting in front of medium sized standard tractors. The new developed machine has been tested in three harvest periods.

Because of the very promising test results an industrial production is in preparation. To analyse the storage behaviour of wood chips different outdoor storage experiments were carried out at practice scale. Storage of coarse wood chips from the mower-chipper was compared with storage of fine chips produced by a forage harvester. Only small differences were found between both chip sizes.

New laser rangefinder scanners were developed specifically for drivers’ assistance and autonomous guiding in road vehicles.
These sensor systems were tested in the past years regarding the potential for agricultural engineering purposes. In a first part of the paper a 2D laser rangefinder scanner was tested for detecting round bales on a harvested field from winter rye. In a second part the laser scanner was used for modelling crop stands and measuring crop biomass in winter wheat (R²=0.96) and maize (R²=0.95). In a third part, it was demonstrated that the height of the reflection point increased in a considerable manner depending on the detecting angle of the laser beam; resulting in an overestimation of crop height respectively of crop biomass.