Speaker
Description
Utilising biomass (tree branches and treetops) for energy purposes is a common practice in mechanised forest operations. Collecting biomass, however, may be time consuming if, for easy and effective forwarding, the harvester operator is focussed only on timber piling, but not paying attention to biomass piling. To make biomass forwarding more effective, placing it in piles is an alternative that can boost productivity in the last stage of forest operations: biomass extraction. The objective of this research was to compare the productivity and costs of cut-to-length (CTL) technology in two types of forest operations: with biomass piling (WBP) and with no biomass piling (NBP), while the timber processing in both cases was the same.
The research was carried out in North-West Poland in a pure, 96-y.o. pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) stand, in which clear cutting was applied on an area of 3.33 ha (half WBP and half NBP). A John Deere 1170E harvester and John Deere 1110E forwarder were used, with the forwarder also extracting the remaining biomass. In the WBP and NBP operations, the timber was piled next to the strip roads as usual. However, in WBP, the biomass was placed in piles next to the strip roads (there were empty spaces between each pile), while in NBP, the biomass was equally and continuously distributed along the strip roads.
The productivity (m3 PMH0-1) of timber harvesting and forwarding in WBP was 14% lower in comparison with NBP, while the biomass extraction was 34% higher in WBP than in NBP. Specifically, the productivity (m3 PMH0-1) of the harvester in WBP vs NBP was 18.75 vs 21.32; the productivity of the forwarder was 18.58 vs 21.17; and biomass extraction was 7.37 vs 5.52 (34% more in WBP).
The total costs of timber harvesting, as well as timber and biomass forwarding (weighted arithmetic mean) was 8.84 € m-3 in WBP and 7.88 € m-3 in NBP (thus WBP was 12% more expensive). However, the cost of biomass forwarding only was lower by 33% in WBP (9.19 € m-3) in comparison with NBP (12.18 € m-3).
| Keywords | Harvester; Forwarder; Treetops, Branches |
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