Club of bologna proceedings

Hiroyuki TAKAHASHI 
As I said, BRAIN has two separate 
Departments: a department of research and 
development, and a Department of inspection 
and testing. So for the costs of the Department 
of research and development, 100% of the 
money comes from government. For the testing 
activities, over 90% of the cost will come from 
government, while around 10% of the costs of 
the testing activity are paid for by the industry. 
 
Hans-Hasso BERTRAM 
I will first answer Mr. Chèze from France. Of 
course there are standards, there are projects 
for standards, and there are no standards. The 
first thing I’d like to say is that it’s not our 
intention to create a third committee alongside 
EN and ISO. This is very important. Of course 
when there is not an international EN or ISO 
standard, we adopt national standards. In the 
case where there is not even a national 
standard, we try to see how to adapt our 
experiences in order to come to a solution. And 
all these experiences we then use to make 
proposals for the standards. Because of course 
we have a long experience on testing machines, 
problems on machines, so we can make 
proposals. Thus when there is no standard we 
define a solution and then we make a proposal 
for a standard.
In answer to Prof. Kutzbach’s question about 
the machinery tests done by agricultural 
journals: first, we don’t conduct performance 
tests on tractors, because manufacturers are not 
willing to give us the tractors for more than a 
year for testing, or for more than 100,000 
hours. So we stopped doing these performance 
tests with tractors some years ago, and instead 
we do some test work which approximates 
performance testing with special rules and so 
on. All the questions concerning performance of 
tractors are answered by a special group of 
consultants, which includes some of our 
specialists. As regards the other machines, it 
isn’t possible for us to cover all the groups of 
machines which are of interest to the farmers in 
the year, so we do not have reports for all these 
machines. However they are sometimes covered 
in agricultural journals with short reports. Our 
aim is to cover more and more types of 
machines, and for this reason we have joined 
this agreement: to get more information from 
other countries in order to cover more groups of 
machines.