ever look at a big machine like a crop Harvester and wonder why it's designed
the way it is I wonder why all the time and it's why I became an engineer almost 20 years ago the
thing though with great engineering is it often goes quietly unnoticed it's easy to forget when
everything just works I partnered with John Deere a company I've loved since I was a kid and I had
the opportunity to speak with a brilliant engineer on that exact question why between
massive Harvesters construction equipment and riding mowers there's so much amazing
engineering that makes our modern world possible so today we're peeling back the curtain to see
exactly what kind of challenges Engineers face how they solve it and what a day in the life
of an engineer actually looks like I'm Ricky and this is two bit da [Music] Vinci let's start with
one of my favorite machines the combine harvester in the year 1800 8 4% of people worked in farming
by 1940 one farmer could feed 18 people and by 2016 one farmer could feed 164 people and
combine Harvesters have played a huge role in this combine Harvesters work on a variety of cultivated
seeds like wheat rice oats corn soybeans and rape seed but they don't just cut crops they're
mobile factories on Wheels they separate out the straw The Unwanted stems and leaves and
shoot it out the back while harvesting the seed and based on the type of seed you're after you
just change the combine header but that is an oversimplification and one thing I've learned
is if you want the full picture you have to talk to an engineer who actually worked on it hi am
Carol plof I'm the manager of the virtual design and verification but one of the most
interesting challenges I hadn't even considered until my chat with Dr plof was how to handle
slopes when a machine runs in the field a lot of time it's tilted and what happen is all the ininal
you know where the grain is being separated from the shaft or the straw the grain gets accumulated
on one side or the other for Optimal Performance it's important the seeds are distributed evenly
across the entire separator this ensures the machine can move quickly while Gathering as much
of the crop as possible cuz remember the crop is the money that goes in the farmer's pocket
when you turn it on now you have this feature in here that was implemented of a little uh
elevator that basically shift the grain from one side to the next and and this is automatic and
basically it rebalance how the grain goes through the C and allows the operator to run faster being
more efficient and also to provide grain that are cleaner what's amazing is that all the physics are
actually built in all the way from how the corn kernels balance the the coefficient of restitution
and everything else this is how they're able to simulate with such Precision how the real world
is actually going to behave and engineer around it you can imagine how much money that saves in the
long term historically we've used one rotor it was a much larger rotor and then for various reason we
decided that a twin rotor was a better design to meet the the requirement from our customer
in here so there was a lot of design work that was done by the virtual design verification simulation
engineer to basically redesign those rotor in here that I'm showing in pink to make sure
that the crop that is coming through is uniformly fed and accelerated through the rotor so the crop
comes from the bottom here to the top and what these rotor actually do is they take the corn cob
or if we talk about wheat it basically sheds all of the cobs all the leaves and it separates them
you want to make sure that the rotor in front the accelerator are there to push the material
through and feed as fast as possible again we're refering to efficiency you know and quality the
results one of the biggest drivers of great engineering design today is a
focus on sustainability being more mindful of resources and our impact on the environment
cars have gotten way more efficient so have computers and cell phones and so have
Farms are you ready will all set since 1837 we've been using a traditional
approach where you basically built a physical prototype and you could go out in the field
and verify that the Prototype worked as expected or last or is as good or has the
quality that you expect you know when I came to Deer actually in 1997 I came for
an interview and I stopped at a dealership because they had asked me here to present
about John Deere had come up with just uh his first uh track machine track tractor
basically and as you can probably imagine tracks unlock all kinds of amazing possibilities
with that much larger contact patch you're able to Traverse much more difficult terrain without
getting stuck well our customer here have you know different uh requirements and some case one
tractor might be configuration might be better than the other you know a Sol and crft system
engineer would work with the design engineer to help him understand the impact of different
design configuration on the soil so in this case you know I'm showing in here a miniature version
of a component dram and and what this device does is you know as you insert it in the soil
it gives you a reading and it gives you a reading on how compact your soil is so this is an example
here on how we're using physical prototype and sometime it's just you know easier to go out
to the field take some some of those measurement with either component trometer or some other uh
tools pressure sensors and whatnot that you could use to evaluate let me show you this what John
Deere calls exact shot an excavator robot planter that not only plants seeds but sprays the needed
fertilizer exactly where it's needed reducing overall fertilizer consumption and maximizing
yield what this machine allows us is to test 24/7 3665 days a year in the same uniform condition and
Weir out some of the configuration that may not be working in the field now that whole clip that
was playing was in slow motion that's happening at 30 seeds per second we're allowing it a mechanical
engineer and a software control engineer to work together and in this case what they're doing is
they're applying fertilizer so it's like a machine gun going into the soil and then we
have exactly a fertilizer sprayer that sprays right on the seed it saves a lot of fertilizer
and that's also good for the environment so this is a really good project again that was done uh
physically and again there's there's a lot of value in doing some of those physical protot
especially when you want to combine some of the mechanical and some of the uh software control all
together as you can imagine computers have taken engineering to new heights where we used to have
to physically make 10 different prototypes and test out different designs and iterate over each
and every one now we can create models and test them with simulation you know I talk about the
traditional approach that we've used since 1837 and John de founder was really good at it since
the last probably 40 years we starting to use more uh physics based uh approach physics based model
that we developed this is a tool called discrete element method that allows us to model the physics
between all the soil in here and and the plow share and basically looking at the amount of
force that it takes looking at the flow looking how much residue you're burying because that's
very important to our customer that would be using a plow in this case so just think about it it's
just like mind bugling for me to think like hey somebody as smart as John Deere what would he have
done if he had access to this kind of results that gives him some insight you know to what
the tool is doing you're really diving into the machine it's like you have an x-ray going inside
the combine and think about it you you can't do a video inside the combine it's very difficult so it
really provides a design engineer some greater Insight another farming challenge that you
probably don't think about is just how difficult it is to test on crops based on what time of
year it is for example maybe you're harvesting corn in the midwest well that happens between
September and October and that's the amazing thing about simulation you can actually simulate the
soil composition and get a close to real world example of wherever part of the world you want
to and continue to do your testing and simulation regardless of the Season or if you're looking to
plant or harvest your crop I wanted to highlight some program that was very unique to John de
here our seniors wanted to really um recognize some unique talent we had in the company and um
they wanted to make sure that we had like some people that you know if you're looking for an
expert in my case a so and crop system expert that this person was recognized and then that
would allow other people in the company to maybe leverage that resource that program was
initiated in 2015 originally the focus was more on the engineering side uh deer's manufacturing
company and and that's where the main focus was over the years we've really developed that and
and brought to the surface some people with very similar very unique talent that we wanted to make
sure that we leverage around the Enterprise you know it's my picture when I was named fellow and
uh to me it's just great when I look at that picture again to see the the John Deere plow
right in front and and again to me that was kind of the model uh when I started at Deer
and and now finally we're making some breakthrough and I was showing the example of you know what we
could do virtually now so I think it's a it's a great time to be at uh with John Deere my
favorite companies are companies that really value great engineering and I'm so happy to hear that
John Deere rewards their Engineers the way they do it's absolutely amazing that's how you build
a culture on engineering Excellence back in 2005 George W bush initiated a program that would say
we're going to go and explore Mars and we need some ways of extracting minerals and water and
whatnot so that we're sustainable well at the case what he wanted is he said why not leverage
people in the industry so I start to look into this and the first time I saw this picture this
was from Apollo 14 in 1971 and uh you know what he's holding in his hand here Ricky he's holding
a a comp petrometer so this is one of those famous device I was showing you earlier that were doing
some testing to evaluate the compaction of our soil well and when they went to Apollo 14 Mission
they were doing a lot of soil sampling at the time and they also uh bring some tools like this very
similar to what we're doing what we're using in here to uh basically evaluate how much compaction
you know they had on the soil and if they would have enough traction with their luner vehicle
to get from point A to point B and uh because of that I was ask in 2005 to go and and work
with Naza uh in here so just talking about their recognition on the outside it's very important
actually right around that time that I went to nazza and I was asked to uh make a presentation
to our senior leadership at the time our uh vice president of engineering I I was fairly new at
deer and I was nestly known from our senior leader so it was my first time to to get in the room with
with him and and them and I still remember um him looking at at me he was going to introduce me and
I think he he kind of forgot my name and then he looked at me and he just said well here's Dr dir
he's going to come and present about his work and at at the time I was trying to promote and
and push forward with some of those technology that we're using nowadays but uh that name stuck
with me and uh since then it's it's good story I think engineering really is when the rubber meets
the road it's easy look at something and go yeah I could design that but the nitty-gritty details
are where most of the complications come from for example imagine building a bookshelf it might seem
simple enough cut a couple pieces of wood couple of screws and we're done but then you start to
realize how do you make sure everything's level how do you make sure that they're not skewed how
do you actually secure the hardware to not make it look bad like so many examples the devil is
in the details when it comes to engineering and hopefully this was a really quick look at some
of the amazing engineering happening at John Deere and how computers and modern tech have completely
revolutionized the engineering game and if you thought that was cool check out this video next