Increasing sugar beet feedstock quality through intensification of root cleaning at harvesting

Given the import of fuel energy and lack of access to foreign sugar markets, the need to revive the sugar beet complex is an important factor determining the production of bioethanol from sugar beets in Ukraine. To stabilize the industry, it is necessary to introduce the production of bioethanol in beet processing plants, identifying priority measures for the development of biofuel production in our country and ways to establish the operation of sugar factories for the production of sugar and biofuels. Physical contamination of the heap of harvested roots, which mainly depends on the technical perfection of the working bodies of beet harvesters, leads to a decrease in the quality of raw sugar, because impurities and severely damaged, including diseases and pests, roots prevent the extraction of sugar, reducing the quality of diffusion juice and increasing the sugar content in the molasses. Known developments when installed on the root harvester additional cleaning and transporting devices complicated its design and overall dimensions. With this in mind, the aim of the study is to improve the quality of cleaning of roots during their excavation by modeling the surface of the cleaner-conveyor of the digging working body. The research was carried out by methods of applied geometry, agricultural mechanics, analysis of variance using the software application MS Excel. Samples of heap of root crops were taken according to the methodology of the Institute of Bioenergy Crops and Sugar Beets. The most widespread among digging working bodies of modern root-harvesting machines of domestic and foreign production are diggers of disk type due to their ability to crush the soil well with a small amount of its fence, reliability of work on heavy soils and weedy fields and high productivity. In the upper rear part of the disk digging working body there is a beater or a screw auger, to which the roots are fed in a pile with the remnants of a disc cut of soil, buds and weeds. The disadvantage is the low cleaning capacity of the bittering device, which solely by impact overturns a pile of roots, or a screw with a screw winding, when the roots together with plant and soil residues accumulate in the rear area of the auger, which also leads to a decrease in productivity of the technological process of digging and deterioration of cleaning of roots. Experimental field studies of the developed samples of new augers-conveyors of the disk digger established that at work of clearing surfaces with winding in the form of direct and inclined helicoids of a variable step at the increased hardness of soil the quantity of lumps in diameter more than 50 mm essentially decreases as in variants , and in relation to control. Indicators of impurities in the form of green mass and the number of damaged roots at medium soil hardness are the lowest in the case of using an inclined helical auger. The inclined helical auger on soils of the increased hardness also provided decrease in weight of the damaged root crops in comparison with the bither cleaner. Researchers of the Institute of Bioenergy Crops and Sugar Beets NAAS continue research to develop and improve technologies for growing and harvesting sugar beets in order to improve their productivity and quality of raw materials for processing into bioethanol and biodiesel