Fuel consumption affects both costs and environmental impact of logging operations.
Traditionally, fuel consumption has been estimated through studies of individual machines, through follow-up studies based on company records or through questionnaires. Using automatically collected data from machine computers, in the form of standardized harvester production, forwarder production, and machine operational monitoring files, offers a new way to estimate fuel consumption. Researchers aimed to estimate fuel consumption in cut-to-length logging operations based on automatically recorded data, and to evaluate whether this data is sufficient on its own or needs to be supplemented with additional data.
Average fuel consumption per harvested m3 varied from 1.4 to 3.4 l (0.31 to 0.75 gal), depending on machine size, tree size, and transport distance. The study shows that fuel consumption per machine type or logging team can largely be explained using the machine data. Classification of machines into size classes is a challenge, as machine configurations vary between individual machines, but such classification may not be needed. Forwarded volumes are a source of error, since this data is manually fed into the machine computer and, therefore, often deviates from the felled volume in a harvesting block. This will probably cause a slight overestimation of forwarder fuel consumption.
Estimating fuel consumption based on automatically collected data from the machine computers, in the form of standardized harvester production, forwarder production, and machine operational monitoring files, produces reliable results. Fuel consumption per m3 varied from 1.4 l (0.31 gal) for teams with a large forwarder to 3.3 l (0.73 gal) for teams with a small forwarder. These results compare well with results from studies using more traditional methods. A source of variation that needs to be addressed is inaccuracies in the manually reported forwarded volumes. Better classifications of the machines used might improve the results – but the results indicate that machine classifications might be unnecessary – as would better descriptions of the work task.
This information was published in the International Journal of Forest Engineering (2023). The title was “Fuel consumption in logging operations in Sweden” and the researchers were Eliasson, Kalle Kärhä & John Arlinger. Source