A Pvdf Sensor for Monitoring Grain Loss in Combine Harvester

Grain loss sensor is an important monitoring module to realize the intelligent automatic control in combine harvester. Polyvinylidene fluoride piezoelectricity film has been one of the most widely used macromolecule materials at present. Based on its piezoelectric effect, in this paper, a grain loss monitoring system for combine harvester by using the PVDF sensor was designed. The system is composed of the PVDF sensor, intelligent display, SCM and so on. The working principle was analyzed and the measuring accuracy was dynamic calibrated in laboratory. The polyvinylidene fluoride piezoelectricity film was selected as the sensing material and the signal processing circuit was mainly composed by charge amplifier, band-pass filter. In order to verify the accuracy of the sensor, the dynamic calibration experiments were carried out. By adjustment of the feeder’ s vibration parameters, the different feeding velocity can be gained. In the dynamic calibration experiments, the sensor was fixed at the height of 19.5 mm and the fixing angle of 33°~35°, the feeding velocity of 60~80 grain per second, 1000samples of full grain were randomly selected in the experiments, and the results indicated the detecting error was less than 5.7%. Using the different mixture ratio of the full grain, the imperfect grain, short stalk to do multigroup experiments, the result shows that the sensor can distinguish the grain from the mixture stalks. In the rig-tests, the monitoring sensor was fixed on the caudal region of the cylinder concave grid of the combine harvester in order to monitor the threshing compounds. The precision error of the monitoring sensor in combine is less than 8% through field experiments. So this advanced sensor can realize the aim of monitoring the entrainment loss in combine harvester.