Biomass harvester destined for overseas

Stock & Land (Australia)
MATT CAWOOD
12 Oct, 2010 10:56 AM

AUSTRALIANS have developed the world’s first high-efficiency harvester to chip mid-sized trees, but the investment’s first destination may be offshore.

The harvester, developed by Biosystems Engineering in Toowoomba, Qld, will in its final form be capable of chipping 50-70 tonnes of trees up to eight metres high in an hour.

Biosystems managing director and principal engineer, Richard Sulman, said the harvester’s unique attribute is that it grabs and chips the trees vertically, leveraging gravity to make the process very energy-efficient. The concept was dreamed up by Future Farm Industries CRC researcher Rick Giles, and made real by Biosystems.

The design will mean that for the first time, trees with a trunk size of 70-250 millimetres can be cost-effectively chipped. The inability to do this has been a major blockage to the development of a biomass energy industry.

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