Have manufacturers built components to stop combine fires?

Dan Humburg said they have sold about 150 kits to farmers in North Dakota and South Dakota. In Canada, they have sold some kits for use on canola. They have also sold kits into Minnesota for flowers, one in Montana for safflower, and a couple in Nebraska for flowers.

Dan Humburg, former faculty member at South Dakota State University (SDSU), who has researched the reason for combine fires when cutting sunflowers, spoke about fire prevention during the recent North Dakota State University Getting it Right sunflower production conference.

Most sunflower farmers have heard of the SDSU research that points to the sunflower's "foamy-like" pith inside its stem as causing combine fires.

That material becomes crumbly, particularly after the plant freezes and then warms up and dries down again. Windy days worsen the threat.

"When it goes through the rotor of a combine, it grinds to a very fine powder and doesn't weigh enough to settle out of the air very quickly," he said. "It's mostly air with just a shell of material around it, which makes it highly reactive. It’ll wrap around the machine and be pulled through the radiators by the engine."

Two producers told Humburg they trapped the lightweight material by using very fine screens. However, even that didn't solve the problem.

The producers told him that the material "was just a continuous sparkle in the air around those hot components."

While the SDSU research did not prove it, Humburg said the machine develops an electrical charge on those little particles that may be the opposite charge of many of the surfaces on the combine development.

"It just clings to the machine and builds up very quickly. Any of those small sparks off the exhaust system that land on a dusty surface can start a smolder," he said.

What have major manufacturers done about the problem?

• There is a high-intake chimney air intake that can be bought to put on a combine. That can help because it takes in cleaner air to the radiators and to the engine.

"I can't say how effective it is because it depends on the weather conditions and the wind, but that would certainly help," he said.

• In 2022, New Holland and Case IH started putting a stainless steel box enclosure around the exhaust manifold on the flagship machines, the large ones (Case 8250 and 9250). It wasn't specific for flowers.

"It helps. It's going to reduce all those nooks and crannies between the ports on the exhaust manifold so you don't accumulate as much debris and things like corn silks and stuff like that in there that can cook off and perhaps cause fires," he said.

But the exhaust manifold is not the hottest component because the manifold is bolted to the engine block and the block is cooled by liquid on the inside nearby.

"When we get to the exhaust turbine where there is no pooling anymore, that exhaust funnels up through that, and then the exhaust turbine area will actually approach the temperature of the exhaust or a little bit below that," he said.

On Case IH and New Holland machines, there is a "choke" that is there to deliberately choke back the exhaust and heat it up quickly when you start up the machine.

"That is designed to get the exhaust temperature up so that it will light off the catalyst and cause it to start to do its thing. Otherwise, it will produce unacceptable levels of hydrocarbons in the exhaust. This section of exhaust is still going to be hot by design," he said.

As an option, Case IH and New Holland have begun to offer a new system that requires that you buy the air compressor option for the engine.

"It directs those air jets at the exhaust turbine to prevent dust accumulation and I am sure the intent of it is to keep you from accumulating anything that could cook off and start on fire on that location," Humburg said.

It clears the area about once every minute, which works.

"It will help unless you have a process that's continuously throwing sparks off here and then I’m not sure it will help because you still have dusty air coming through this area all the time," he said.

• John Deere paid attention to what SDSU were working on back in 2011-12 with the help of the National Sunflower Association. They have a stainless steel box around components. There is a tube on the right-hand side where they pump clean filtered air into the stainless steel box and there is a single exit point.

"The exhaust manifold below has an aluminum blanket crimped around it to try to keep the surface temperature down," Humburg said.

The design changed several times. They finally enclosed the diesel particulate filter and pumped filtered air into it.

"That stopped the problem they had because when that component regenerates to burn the soot that it traps, it gets very hot," he said.

• The kit designed and offered by DSH Engineering, and is a product that utilizes SDSU research as a comprehensive solution to the exhaust system problem.

"The firestop kit is the thing that we developed at SDSU and that I now try to design and manufacture for people that want the hot manifold, the exhaust turbine, and the hottest exhaust pipe section all put in a single enclosure. Then we filter air and pump that filtered air into the enclosure to exclude the dust," Humburg said.

Humburg keeps it under "a little bit of positive pressure so the dust can't get in it."

"There's a little centrifugal blower on the right-hand side over there that's coupled right to the air filter and we pump that clean filtered air then through a network of tubes that accommodates different design engine or different combine designs," he said. "It keeps the dusty air from being able to get near the hot parts."

Humburg said they have sold about 150 kits to farmers in North Dakota and South Dakota. In Canada, they have sold some kits for use on canola. They have also sold kits into Minnesota for flowers, one in Montana for safflower, and a couple in Nebraska for flowers.

"I’ve sold a couple to guys that have problems with smolders in soybeans, as well. It protects all of those volatile situations," he said. "The user feedback I get on this system is quite positive. A fair share of the kits that I sell now are actually repeat customer kits. Once they’ve had it on the combine, they’re not very inclined to operate without it, and so they tend to buy another one when they trade up."

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