Development of Tractor Slippage Virtual Test System

A new method is proposed and discussed in this paper, based on Virtual Prototyping Technology. The aim is to test the wheel-type tractor slippage which is an important index to indicate whether the engine power is fully converted by the wheels into the traction applied to the implements. A 3D model of an existing two-wheel drive tractor (SH500) is constructed in the 3D design software Pro/Engineer and exported out into the virtual prototyping software ADAMS in which the slippage virtual test system is established and the slippage virtual test is carried out. For a general purpose, the virtual system is parameterized so that the parameters as system inputs to define work conditions could be modified by users in terms of specific environment. To verify its feasibility and validation, the virtual test system is set up to work under two given conditions. Results show that the slippage remains almost the same at constant traction, whose averages are 10.36% and 16.69% at 5.4kN and 9.8kN, respectively. So, this means that it is possible to construct a virtual system to acquire the slippage without the necessity of a physical test system and field experiment which are both costly and time-consuming.