Rotor Loss

WHAT IS ROTOR LOSS?

Rotor loss also known as “volunteer yield” is crop that is spit out the back of all rotor combines. The old conventional combines did not experience the rotor loss seen today because of their rotor design, but these machines were limited by speed and capacity. In the 70s rotor combines were designed with significantly more speed and capacity but with that came loss, the machines simply couldn’t capture the volume of threshed grain they could thresh and so came the terms, rotor loss, volunteer yield and tolerable loss.

WHY DOES ROTOR LOSS HAPPEN?

Rotor loss occurs in all crops and with all John Deere and Case IH combines because of an overloaded separation section. An overloaded separator takes place when not enough threshed grain is captured in the concave section. Thus, the separator then cannot separate the amount of grain and crop material being fed in from the concaves.

The combination of stock concaves with sub-par threshing and limited capacity plus an overloaded separation results in grain “voluntarily” being thrown out the back of the machine. The problem of rotor loss exacerbates with increased ground speed, high moisture, high-yield harvest and larger combine headers.

ESTES CONCAVES STOP ROTOR LOSS

The Estes XPR Concave System STOPS rotor loss and volunteer yield. Our concave system solves all the threshing and separating problems mentioned above, plus some. Our concave system helps keep the rotor full and our bars have 135% more threshing surface area than stock round bars. This means more complete and faster threshing. The faster the crop is threshed the quicker we can get it down on the augers and in the tank. Additionally, because we are able to keep the rotor full, we are able to open up the concave and slow the rotor. This equates to less grain damage, fewer splits, cracks and broken kernels.

Once the crop is threshed, we are able to get significantly more grain out in the concave section preventing an overloaded rotor so more grain ends up in your tank sooner. The more crop volume we can get out of the concave section, the less has to be separated over the separation-grate section. Since there is always some grain still caught up in the crop mat (in corn shucks, tailings, etc) we have designed our Xtreme Separation Grate to fluff, toss and disrupt the crop mat capturing any loose grain before being spit out the back of the combine.