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Brazil has plenty of land and water, but the land suitable for agricultural expansion is running out. “One day, the space for growing more crops will be done. The amount of land is limited,” says Lucas Oboli, engineering general manager at Bauer in Brazil. “The only way for you to produce more within the same land is to improve your productivity. And the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to do that nowadays is irrigation.”
That math is why Bauer, the 95-year-old manufacturer headquartered in Voitsberg, Austria, opened a branch in Brazil in the first place. The parent company builds irrigation and slurry equipment for customers in more than 100 countries, with systems watering roughly 2.5 million hectares worldwide. The Brazilian operation is the only unit outside Austria with its own irrigation engineering department, and Oboli runs it.
A machine you can’t buy off the shelf
Bauer’s global catalog has plenty of off-the-shelf irrigation. Brazilian agribusinesses use a number of those components, but with the growing need for customized efficiency, Bauer turns to its engineers to design unique methods for water delivery.
“Most of our products for irrigation here are engineered,” Oboli says. “For example, even though we have a specific portfolio for center pivots, those center pivots are still designed for each irrigation project, for each customer.”
Product engineering specifies the components. A separate application engineering group selects which parts go where for a given field, then works with the dealer network to commission the system. Hose reel machines such as the Rainstar line still ship as standard products, but pivots in Brazil and across Latin America are configured per project.
The reason is that a pivot isn’t really a product, it’s a construction job. Projects are geo-referenced and sized against the customer’s crops and pumping capacity, and the pitch has to include a return-on-investment case rather than a price. Machines can be up to 800 meters in length and ship disassembled. Dealers assemble, commission and connect them on site. When a farm doesn’t already have channels, reservoirs or pumping infrastructure, Bauer builds that too.
“We don’t want to sell just the products. We want to build the project,” Oboli says. “It’s really turnkey.”
The current constraint is more connected to credit than engineering ambition. Brazilian farm financing has tightened over the past several years, and Oboli named that squarely as the hardest problem, “being able to supply the technology they would like to use at the price they are able to pay.” The machines themselves, he noted, are not complicated. “They are really simple machines. But how do you improve it, while keeping the same quality level?”
What breaks when you fill it with water
Anytime ‘water’ and ‘big’ are in the same conversation, there are bound to be challenges with weight and inertia. Bauer’s mechanical design runs in Designcenter Solid Edge, and the team pairs modeling with structural simulation on new designs as well as on changes to existing ones. The load case that drives most of it is water.
“Once you put water on those machines, its weight goes up by 30 percent in each span,” Oboli says.
That load lands on a structure that also has to move. Pivot spans ride on drive towers that walk across the field, and the stress concentrates in joints, connections, the chassis and the drive gear. These components are the linchpins for the machines to operate, but are heavily strained by the operation under load.
The more delicate problem is alignment. A Bauer pivot doesn’t rotate as a rigid body, it advances one tower at a time, with alignment units measuring the misalignment angle at each joint and driving individual towers to keep the span in line. Bauer’s own alignment control mounts the lever directly above the swivel point of the flexible joint, so torsion in the pipe doesn’t corrupt the reading. All of that geometry gets designed and evaluated in the software, including how it behaves on ground that refuses to cooperate.
“It’s not always plain,” Oboli says. “There is a lot of irregular terrain, so the machine gets all torqued on itself.”
Physical prototypes of an 800-meter machine are expensive, and simulation moves the discovery of a problem upstream of building one.
“My department is responsible for checking everything that is safety related, and the available software and systems to make it possible for the guys to work in the field. We prepare everything in Designcenter Solid Edge, create the different kinds of spans of the pivot, and test and simulate,” says Leandro Certorio, who runs IT for Bauer in Brazil. “And after this, when everything goes okay, then we go to testing in the field.”
Why Siemens remains part of the process
Bauer has been a Siemens software customer for more than five years, which is an arrangement that started in Austria and extended into the Brazil location. Seats are split across both operations in a mix of cloud and local licenses.
When asked what keeps Designcenter Solid Edge a part of their design process, Oboli didn’t answer with a feature. “Today, I’d say it’s more of the capabilities of integration within our other systems. We do have a whole set of engineers here from different disciplines. Siemens software is able to communicate with the other teams, as well. It’s not hard to integrate the firmware within the hardware, within the electrical systems, within the mechanical machines. Those integrations today are a game-changer for us.”
He’s candid that Bauer is not stretching the platform. “We really use the simple tools,” he says. What the toolset really has to do is hold up across a mechanical team, an electrical team and a firmware team all working on the same product, without anyone exporting geometry into a format that loses something along the way.
From machines to technology
Bauer has increased their market share in Brazil, but Oboli doesn’t expect quality to be the only differentiator that betters their position.
“Anyone is able to achieve good steel work, and design good pivots,” he says. “The difference is that we can holistically integrate different technologies into the same portfolio.”
The technology arc started with automation, eliminating the drive from pivot to pivot for field work. Bauer’s differentiator was making that automation work where connectivity barely exists, which describes most of rural Brazil, to provide remote monitoring and control through their mobile and web platforms. The current push is turning accumulated operational data into decisions with predictive maintenance, variable-rate irrigation and water applied only where it’s needed.
More than 60 percent of the items on Bauer’s product roadmap are now new technologies and features, rather than new steel.
Asked what keeps him going, Oboli gave an answer he clearly hadn’t rehearsed: leading the engineers who work for him, and having the autonomy to make calls. “The day that we don’t have any challenges in engineering here, I think, will mark the day I will be less motivated.” Then he adds, “I don’t think I would work for a game development company. Not that I don’t see the value in that, but there are so many more urgent matters in the world where we could be of more help.” And bringing water to remote Brazilian agriculture is part of that.
To learn more, visit Siemens.
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