Two Agritechnica silver medals for CLAAS innovations
The Agritechnica New Products Committee of the DLG [German Agricultural Society] has awarded silver medals to two CLAAS innovations. The new integration of Terranimo® in the CEMOS for tractors operator assistance system and the CEMOS AUTO HEADER function, which performs automatic adjustment of CLAAS VARIO cutterbars, are the two innovations which the jury of scientists and farmers recognised with the awards.
Soil protection integrated interactively in the tractor terminal
The first silver medal goes to the CEMOS for tractors operator assistance system which in future will be able to draw on the decades of specialist knowledge concentrated in the Terranimo® application in order to calculate the risk of harmful soil compaction without any increase in the operator’s workload. A display on the CEBIS terminal informs the operator if the current tractor-implement combination represents a risk of harmful soil compaction under the prevailing soil conditions. The calculations required for this are based on machine and soil condition data which are obtained from the CEMOS assistance system and are combined with Terranimo®, a soil compaction simulation model developed by Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH-HAFL) in cooperation with the Agroscope Research Institute in Reckenholz, Aarhus University in Denmark and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
If the operator responds to the visual display of the compaction risk for three soil layers by modifying any of the settings – such as the tyre pressure – for the tractor-implement combination, this information is fed straight into the current risk assessment performed by the Terranimo® function. In this way, the operator receives direct feedback on the effect of the optimisation process.
CEMOS AUTO HEADER adjusts VARIO cutterbars automatically
The jury awarded the second silver medal for the extension of the CEMOS environment on the LEXION and TRION models to include the CEMOS AUTO HEADER system. Until now, when performing combining operations with VARIO cutterbars, the table length and both the vertical and horizontal position of the reel had to be adjusted manually by the operator to obtain an optimal, even crop flow. In order to reduce the workload of the operator in this area too, CLAAS has developed the CEMOS AUTO HEADER assistance system which automatically adjusts these cutterbar settings in accordance with the prevailing threshing conditions. Data from a laser sensor is used to control the reel depth setting while the table length and the horizontal reel position are controlled on the basis of oscillation data acquired by the material feed height sensor in the feeder housing.
The resulting even crop feed into the combine harvester not only reduces the load on all the key assemblies from the cutterbar to the feeder housing to the primary and secondary separation stages, but also improves the threshing performance and enables sustained operation at full capacity.
