Chopper systems in cane harvesters: A: development of a test facility

At current sugar prices, the annual loss to the industry through juice and fibre losses resulting from the chopper harvester billeting process exceeds $35 million per year in Australia. Despite the development of numerous different designs by manufacturers, little detailed research has been undertaken to understand and quantify performance of the chopper systems in cane harvesters since the universal adoption of the rotary-pinch chopper system in the early 1980s. Major difficulties encountered in researching chopper system performance have been the measurement of appropriate parameters, feeding the system with realistic flow rates to properly represent the operating conditions under which chopper systems operate, and the ability to easily exchange alternative system designs in a testing program. A full-scale chopper test facility was constructed at BSES Bundaberg to allow performance testing and research on cane harvester chopper systems. Outputs from the test facility include instrumentation data and high-speed cine footage. Results from a chopper test program using this facility are presented and discussed in a second paper in the series.