Design analysis and performance evaluation of a self-locking hydrostatic differential for automated agriculture spray vehicle

Abstract

The differential is an important part of the automobile transaxle. The purpose of the differential is to distribute power to the two rear wheels and provide differential speed to the vehicle wheels when the vehicle takes a turn. Conventional transaxle of the automobile has clutch, gear box and differential in the power train which makes the transaxle very heavy and also automatic control of the system is difficult, as one has to control the clutch and brake arrangement simultaneously. Single plate clutch is commonly used as the transmission element in most transmissions for four wheeler vehicles. Agriculture vehicles and farming equipment like tractors and Tillers, Sprayers etc., also use a similar automobile transmission. With the shortage in labour and also increase in labour expenses there is a trend to automate the farming equipment to save time and labour cost. The major challenges in automation is the clutch control which is presently manual, and the automatic clutch control in the high end vehicles cannot be used due to the high cost, complexity of design. Hence in order to carry out the automatic control of vehicle an automatic speed control, differential control and brake control is needed. The project work aims at design and development of hydrostatic transmission differential locking system for an automated agriculture vehicle where in the differential drive and control arrangement will be both hydraulically operated. The components will be designed using Unigraphix software and the numerical analysis of the components will be done using Ansys work bench. Further the developed hydrostatic differential lock model will be tested to determine the performance characteristics of the drive.