Major causes of failure during harvesting in sugarcane chopper harvester machine

Abstract

Evaluation of maintenance strategies is an issue which must widely be considered. This paper describes failure rate, mean time between failures (MTBF) and availability analysis for Austoft 7000 sugarcane harvesters series used in agro-industries in southwestern Iran. Sugarcane harvester was divided into three subsystems and the failures were studied for 1800 working hours. The failure rate of subsystems including hydraulic, mechanical and electrical were calculated 0.087, 0.052 and 0.012 h-1, respectively and the total failure rate was 0.15 h-1. MTBF after 1800 working hours were obtained 11.46 h, 19.35 h and 85.71 h for the aforementioned subsystems and machine MTBF was 6.64 h. Among the three studied subsystems, hydraulic with maximum failure rate and minimum MTBF and electrical subsystem with minimum failure rate and maximum MTBF were recognized as the most unreliable and reliable subsystems respectively. Moreover, availability analysis showed availability for hydraulic, mechanical and electrical subsystems were 85%, 90% and 98%, respectively. However, total machine availability was 76%.