Quantification of Service Loads on Agricultural Tractors

With increasing competition and globalization, the Indian Tractor Industry is gearing up to develop new proven design of tractors. The conventional methodology of trial and error design and its proving is becoming obsolete and practically too time consuming to meet the demands.

Many designers are already in need of field data as the base for design. Prototype proving and reliability testing of the components and tractors in the laboratory has become the need of the day. All these requires quantification of service loads in the Laboratory.

This paper describes in brief the methodology of these exercises, selection of instrumentation and data acquisition systems, typical problems of data acquisition on the tractors, based on the experience. This paper also provides illustrative examples of data acquisition and typical applications of the acquired data.