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 differentials although provide the differential speeds but fails to prevent slip of the differential. In vehicles for application in agriculture it is essential to have differential locking due to slippery conditions hence a differential locking system is needed. Limited slip differentials are available but they are very costly and also they do not offer complete differential locking. Present solutions available in market are either too primitive where in the driver has to get down from the vehicle and then lock the differential or they are very sophisticated in the form of E-locker from EATON which is very costly to implement in commercial vehicles. The project work aims at design development of self-locking differential locking system for an automated agriculture vehicle where in the differential drive and the locking arrangement will be both hydraulically operated. The components will be designed used Unigraphix software and the analysis of the components will be done using Ansys work bench. Further the developed hydrostatic differential model will be tested to determine the performance characteristics of the drive.