Country road and field surface profiles acquisition, modelling and synthetic realisation for evaluating fatigue life of agricultural machinery

• A sensor-frame was developed to acquire geo-referenced road and field profiles.
• Profiles were acquired from a country road and from a mowed grass field.
• Fatigue damage was calculated using the quarter-car model and linear damage rule.
• Synthetic realisations were created from real spectrum and ISO 8608 modelling.
• Real spectrum models showed better results than the ISO 8608 based models.

Fatigue life of agricultural machinery is strongly affected by the surfaces that these machines operate on. In the present paper a sensor-frame was developed to acquire road and field profiles in absolute geo-referenced coordinates. The sensor-frame was validated by measuring discrete trapezoidal bumps with known dimensions resulting in a root mean squared (RMS) error of 6–8 mm. Profiles were acquired from a country road and from a mowed grass field. Using the quarter-car vehicle model, the movement of an agricultural vehicle was simulated for various speeds. The resulted vertical loads were rainflow-counted and the accumulated fatigue pseudo damage was calculated using Palmgren–Miner linear rule. Based on the derived Power Spectrum Density (PSD), the profiles were classified according to ISO 8608 standard. Two methodologies were followed to model and create a number of synthetic realisations for each profile: Direct Spectrum Estimate (DSE) and ISO based modelling. Simulating the produced synthetic profiles with the quarter-car vehicle model, the corresponding pseudo damage was calculated. The accumulated damages from the DSE models were closer to the corresponding ones from the measured profiles. ISO based models could not model the profile irregularities, which proved to contribute the largest part of the accumulated fatigue damage.