Failure analysis of PTO shaft of an agricultural tractor

Abstract

The Power Take-Off (PTO) shaft is an efficient means of transferring mechanical power between farm tractors and attached implements. The PTO shaft of any agricultural tractor is basically a drive shaft engraving with number of splines that converts the primary energy of the tractor to a rotating motion of a nicely connected power shaft. The shaft is usually having external splines and its rotational movement is actually valuable for the operation of various farm implements like pumps, thresher, rotary tiller etc. to do numerous farming operations because it could be coupled at its external end. Because of the movement of the PTO shaft, the attached implements perform the final agricultural operations. During the operations, number of failures usually occurred to the PTO the shaft and the attached implements. They could become very unsafe to the users as it may stopped working of the attached implement/equipment suddenly. In this research, a metallurgical investigation has been carried out to study the root cause of failure in a PTO shaft. It was found out that the failure happened where there is sudden change in the shaft cross sectional area which leads its failure due to torsion and bending effects. The analysis results may be helpful to the end users as far as the cost during various farming operations is concerned.