Technology and energy balance in stump harvesting with MCR500

Abstract

With the increasing demand for renewable energy in the domestic market, additional attention is paid to the use of stump-wood in energy supply. The stump harvesting technology is not substantiated sufficiently so that the end users can use this unpredictable raw material to generate heat and power. Service providing logging companies need to know the specific requirements to equipment and the characteristics of stump harvesting technologies in order to assess the possibility of acquiring this natural resource. The stump harvesting should be planned along with the regenerative felling, because the layout of the timber forwarding roads and the characteristic of the logging residues layer on the road surface are important. In its turn, when planning the upper timber yard, it is necessary to take into account the meteorological data, the prevailing wind direction and water streams. The aim of the study is to find out the total energy balance during the stump extraction with the MCR500 bucket.