Cleaning loss sensors on combine harvesters: a literature review

Precision agriculture is an important development direction of modern agriculture. Since the 20th century, the rapid development of sensor technology has had a great impact on the monitoring and evaluation methods of crop planting. The loss in the cleaning process is the main source of the losses in the combine harvesters during the harvesting process. Using sensors instead of manual methods in counting losses saves labor costs and time, and can be combined with developing algorithms and Internet of Things technology to further improve the accuracy of loss prediction. This review summarizes the methods of monitoring the cleaning losses in harvesters during the harvesting process, which introduces the latest research progress of the cleaning loss sensors. It focuses on the most commonly used cleaning sensors which are based on piezoelectric effect. As for the sensors using thin film structures, due to their immaturity of the emerging PVDF thin film related technologies, the mainstream cleaning loss sensors still use piezoelectric ceramics as sensitive components. Finally, this paper also introduces the research progress of the cleaning loss algorithms and monitoring systems.