Abstract
The steering system of a vehicle impacts on the vehicle performance, safety and on the driver’s comfort. Moreover, in off-road vehicles using hydrostatic steering systems, the energy dissipation also becomes a critical issue. These aspects push and motivate innovation, research and analysis in the field of agricultural tractors. This paper proposes the modelling and analysis of a hydrostatic steering system for an agricultural tractor to calculate the performance of the system and determine the influence of its main design parameters. The focus here is on the driver’s steering feel, which can improve the driver’s behavior reducing unnecessary steering corrections during the working conditions. The hydrostatic steering system is quite complex and involves a hydraulic circuit and a mechanical mechanism to transmit the steering to the vehicle tires. The detailed lumped parameters model here proposed allows to simulate the dynamic behavior of the steering system and to both enhance the understanding of the system and to improve the design through parameters sensitivity analysis.
Highlights
Fluid power systems are used in mobile applications to perform several operations, from load handling and hydraulic equipment control, to the translation and steering control of the vehicle
This paper proposes the modelling and analysis of a hydrostatic steering system for an agricultural tractor to calculate the performance of the system and determine the influence of its main design parameters
The detailed lumped parameters model here proposed allows to simulate the dynamic behavior of the steering system and to both enhance the understanding of the system and to improve the design through parameters sensitivity analysis
Summary
Fluid power systems are used in mobile applications to perform several operations, from load handling and hydraulic equipment control, to the translation and steering control of the vehicle. Due to the ever increasing demand for fossil fuels and pollution limits, researchers in the field are strongly committed in the aim to reducing dissipation in this kind of system, and to this end new alternative architectures and solutions are being proposed, regarding the entire hydraulic subsystem in the vehicle, as done in [1], or focusing on some subsystems as the transmission, as done in [2], and even just on the steering system [3] These works demonstrate how modelling and simulation represent strong and reliable approaches and have the advantage of allowing a better understanding of the baseline system and of the influence of the design parameters on the system performance. It is not surprising that a thorough understanding of the system can be considered a key factor to improve the whole vehicle performance
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