An agricultural tractor is often modified for special farming applications such as horticulture where the standard design is not suitable or accessible. In such cases, farm equipment manufacturers are demanded frugal and cost effect Engineered farming solutions. One such design is the innovative High Ground Clearance Tractor (HGCT) kit offered to increase the Tractor height without damaging the crop during farming operations.
In this paper, the author proposes a durability assessment method to evaluate the HGCT kit attachments to meet the durability criteria. Road load data acquisition is done to measure the acceleration and strain levels for various horticulture operations such as tillage, spraying and transportation. Actual operating conditions are simulated with the help of four poster durability setups inside the lab which helps to reduce the field testing for design iterations. Multi-body dynamics simulation (MBS) is used to front-load the four-poster lab testing in virtual and extract the loads on the spindle for durability simulation.
The transient load's data from MBS on the spindle level is used in FEMFAT Channel MAX to predict the critical locations & component life and shows a good correlation with the test samples. Multiple design iterations are performed to meet the acceptance criteria. Finalized design cleared physical validation and implement successfully in the Tractor.