Design of a virtual combine harvester Original Research Article

Separation processes in agricultural machinery are typically non-linear, complex and uncertain. On-line measurements of input and output data are not available. Therefore, black-box modelling is not applicable and other techniques to describe the system must be used. In this paper, a dynamic separation model is constructed to predict the input–output behaviour of the separation section based on a combination of physical process knowledge and experimental results. When the hybrid separation model is implemented in a framework to simulate the total harvesting process, a virtual combine harvester is obtained, ready to process virtual fields that are created with standard software programs.