A key client of the Belgian consulting firm Vintecc recently redesigned and built a harvesting machine with a highly customized architecture. With a 780hp engine driving three independent rear axles and two independent wheels on the front axle, the harvester is capable of collecting and hauling 100 tons of produce in a single load.
Vintecc designed and implemented the control system for the entire harvester, including the powertrain, collector, and all other mechanical and hydraulic components, using Simulink®and Model-Based Design.
“With any huge machine, safety and reliability are critical,” says Vincent Theunynck, founder and principal engineer at Vintecc. “By modeling and simulating the control software as well as the powertrain and other core components in Simulink, we could see how it all worked. We verified that the software performed as intended—first in model-in-the-loop simulations, then in hardware-in-the-loop simulations—before testing on the actual machine.”