Evaluation of Engine Fuel Consumption with Mechanical and Intelligent Electronic Control System in Sugarcane 7000 Harvester

Today, one of the main challenges is to control fuel consumption, which has an effective role on other sectors of the economy. In this situation, efficient practices are necessary to reduce fuel consumption leading to lower costs. This paper shows how an intelligent control system has been designed and how an electronic engine speed control system was replaced with the mechanical system. The aim of construction and evaluation of an electronic system was to control engine speed in harvesting machines. The conventional control of engine speed in 7000 series sugarcane harvesters is mechanical. Stepper motor, drivers, micro-controller, joystick and potentiometer were used, as well as the C programming in code-vision to program the microcontrollers. A t test was conducted to compare fuel consumption between the systems. The statistical analysis showed significant difference between the control systems in 1% probability level. Results from the implementation of this system represented the design and proper functioning of the system. The results showed a reduction of about 6.3% in fuel consumption when electronic control system was used, comparing to mechanical control and this was due to the use of intelligent and automatically control of engine speed. Installation of this system on existing sugarcane harvesters will save about 505,000 liters of fuel annually.