Driver assistance system of a forage harvester

Abstract

A driver assistance system of an agricultural work machine constructed as forage harvester, wherein the agricultural work machine comprises a header for gathering crop, a chopping device having a chopping drum and chopping knives for comminuting the crop, and a monitoring device operable to generate a signal containing information about the wear status of the respective chopping knife and / or about the distance of the cutting edge of a chopping knife from a shear bar. This information is compared with a reference value, and the agricultural work machine has activation devices for activating and deactivating a knife grinding process and means for change of position of the shear bar. The monitoring device is integrated in the driver assistance system so that the driver assistance system automatically detects when a knife grinding process or a change of position of the shear bar must be activated or deactivated.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims priority under 35 USC 119 of German Application No. DE 10 2019 112 968.0, filed on May 16, 2019, German Application No. DE 10 2019 112 973.7, filed on May 16, 2019 and German Application No. DE 10 2019 112 965.6, filed on Jul. 1, 2019, the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]The invention is directed to a driver assistance system of an agricultural work machine constructed as forage harvester for monitoring the wear status of chopping knives.[0003]A sensor arrangement which detects the revolving knives of a chopping drum arrangement by means of inductive sensors and derives a wear status of the chopping knives from the determined magnetic flux is known from DE 10 2017 103 537. Wear is determined from the induced voltage.[0004]In addition, a similar cutting sharpness detection device is known, inter alia, from EP 1 522 214. In this case, optical sensors such as ca...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The invention is a driver assistance system that can monitor the wear status of chopping knives. The system uses signals from a monitoring device to determine the sharpness of the knives and the distance between the knives and the cutting edge of the chopping device. When the actual value falls below the reference value, the system will trigger a grinding process or change the position of the chopping device to address the issue. The system can also infer the wear of the chopping knives based on the radius of the chopping device and steps to reduce wear. This relieves the operator from configuring effort and ensures automated configuration of the chopping device. Additionally, the system can improve wear detection by analyzing the frequency components of voltage signals and deriving a measurement for the knife's wear status.

Problems solved by technology

Optical sensors have the problem that the cutting edge analysis is made more difficult by the high revolving speeds of the chopping knives, which often leads to poor-quality analysis results.

However, the evaluating process which is exclusively directed to the induced voltage does not always lead to a sufficiently accurate estimation of a wear status.

The drawback of this is that the known driver assistance system does not remove the operator of the agricultural work machine from the process of grinding the chopping knives.

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