Effect of Sugarcane Chopper Harvester Extractor Parameters on Impurity Removal and Cane Losses

The extractor is a key component of sugarcane harvester, and its ability to remove impurities has an important effect on harvesting quality and benefit of sugar mills and sugarcane growers. Due to the low impurity removal efficiency of the existing harvesters, to improve the performance of extractor is one of the urgent problems to tackle. In this study, an extractor platform was fabricated and used to carry out the orthogonal test (three factors and three levels) to investigate the significant effect of the fan speed, the cane feeding rate, and cane length on the impurity rate and cane losses. Results revealed that: there is a positive correlation between the fan speed and the extractor chamber wind speed and pressure; feeding rate has no significant effect on impurity rate but has a significant impact on cane losses; fan speed (wind speed & pressure) and cane length have significant influence on impurity rate and cane losses. Further, the trend of the influence of each significant factor on the evaluation index was obtained by single factor test. Test results showed that: the cane loss with three fan speeds were all reduced with increasing feeding rates and the inseparable impurity rate was the main factor that affects the overall impurity rate. Therefore, the key to reduce the impurity rate is to reduce the inseparable impurity rate. In addition, extra extracting tests was carried out to show that: the impurity rate with no sugarcane tops was less than 5%, which met the requirements of sugar mills; the impurity rate with sugarcane tops was between 7.9%-10.2%, which cannot meet the requirements of sugar mills. Therefore, the topping operation was necessary before harvesting.