817 hectares more ploughing
DuraMaxx is a new plough body developed by LEMKEN, which offers significantly reduced wear and tear costs. This is supported by recent findings from Kiel Polytechnic.
2007 saw the creation of a completely new idea: manufacture the mouldboard, mouldboard slats and shin without damaging the basic material, and without any drilling, punching, or countersinking. The engineers at Alpen were convinced that they could use very much harder grades of steel to considerably increase the service life of the new DuraMaxx plough compared with the previous Dural body. Since the wearing elements no longer formed part of the supporting structure, they promised to offer additional useful service life, because the wearing parts could be exploited fully. For some time, Kiel Polytechnic has been running a continuous test to establish whether the LEMKEN engineers’ expectations were actually achieved in the field. A LEMKEN five-furrow Juwel 8 mounted plough with Dural wearing parts was compared with one fitted with the new DuraMaxx body. About 360 hectares of plough testing has been carried out so far to precisely assess wear on the parts. Reference values were the initial weights and thicknesses of the individual components on the plough body. After each 100 hectares of ploughing the weights of these parts were recorded again and documented at the next scheduled maintenance session.
Beyond 200 hectares there is a clear winner for wear resistance
The Polytechnic research team’s interim results for the practical tests established that the wear behaviour of the existing Dural body compared with the new DuraMaxx system were almost identical for the first 200 hectares. The Dural and DuraMaxx parts were reduced by roughly the same amount of weight. However, after increasing the ploughing area beyond 200 hectares the DuraMaxx system reduced in weight significantly less in comparison with the standard body, which is clearly due to the higher wear resistance of the harder DuraMaxx fine grain steel. After ploughing 320 hectares, and weighing the wearing parts on the scales, it became clear that the DuraMaxx wearing parts weighed only 158 grams less than at the start of the test, whereas the soil had already worn down the Dural wearing parts by 279 grams. From this they calculated that for the DuraMaxx system an area of 1,867 hectares would be needed to completely wear down the wearing parts, while those on the Dural body would last only 1,050 hectares before the wearing parts would need replacing. This indicates an increased working life of 817 hectares for the new DuraMaxx system.
Tool-free replacement
This theoretical capacity increase of over 75 percent for the harder finegrained steel confirmed the LEMKEN engineers’ predictions of the new material’s potential. The longer service life also means fewer exchange intervals. The new DuraMaxx body design has further advantages, because the mouldboard slats, mouldboard and shin can be connected by simply hooking on to a carrier, without using fixing screws. The wearing parts can therefore be replaced without the need for tools and twice as fast as with conventional bolted bodies. The investigations were carried out by Professor Yves Reckleben* and Niels Schäfer (BSc. in Agriculture) in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Rendsburg, Kiel Polytechnic.
*Department of Agricultural Engineering