COMBINE YIELD MONITOR TEST FACILITY DEVELOPMENT AND INITIAL MONITORING TEST

The Yield Monitor Test Facility’s performance under static grain flow was very good. First, the grain metering system accurately meters grain at varying flow rates to the clean grain elevator over the prescribed time interval. Second, the weigh scale system appears to be very accurate in measuring the accumulated mass flow in the system. However, grain stream dynamics, tank vibration, and load cell sensitivity confounds attempts to measure instantaneous grain flow at low rates of 1 to 4 kg/s. Third, the commercially available yield monitor flow sensor demonstrated excellent accuracy across a wide range of static flow rates from 1.3 to 21.1 kg/s. Percent differences in accumulated mass flow for the yield monitor and the weigh scale were less than 1% at calibration flow rates and approximately 3% for extreme flow rates. Instantaneous mass flow rate variation was observed to be approximately 8% at the mean calibration flow rate.