Abstract

The urgency of the task of effective development of cutting areas on the slopes of mountains, hills, and hilly-ridge reliefs is primarily due to the depletion of available, special, lowland operational forests in Siberia and the Far East, which were once, not quite correctly, called forest-surplus regions of the Russian Federation. The operational woodlands that are convenient for development in Siberia and the Far East are largely depleted. To develop new ones, large-scale road construction is necessary, which requires significant financial expenses and reduces the already low profitability of logging production. It is also declining due to the ever-increasing volume of export of harvested timber, even if the cost of construction and maintenance of a new network of logging roads is not considered. Forest ecosystems located on slopes are among the most vulnerable. When working on the slopes with traditional systems of logging machines, it becomes necessary to cut a serpentine of skid trails, which later become concentrators of water and wind erosion. Currently, leading manufacturers of machinery and equipment for the forest industry, such as Ponsse, John Deer, Komatsu, and others, have developed technical solutions that significantly facilitate the operation of forest machine systems. Such solutions, first of all, include winches integrated into the transmissions of machines. Another solution is to use separate self-propelled winches remotely controlled by the operator of a forest machine, for example, T-winch. In this case, the machine does not receive additional weight from the winch integrated into it; however, the negative impact of forest machines on soils does not disappear, but has its own significant specifics. The article shows that when performing logging operations on slopes, primarily steep ones with slope angles exceeding 20–25°, it is necessary to make adjustments to the assessment of the destruction nature of the soil array and the patterns of the track depth formation under the influence of the skidding system. For citation: Rudov S.E., Shapiro V.Ya., Grigorev I.V., Kunitskaya O.A., Grigoreva O.I. Modeling the Interaction of Forest Machines with Soil when Working on Slopes. Lesnoy Zhurnal [Russian Forestry Journal], 2021, no. 6, pp. 121–134. DOI: 10.37482/0536-1036-2021-6-121-134

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