PSI - Issue 81

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ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 81 (2026) 143–150

© 2026 The Authors. Copy from the contract: Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of DMDP 2025 organizers Keywords: Mobile machines; Вearing structurе; Sprayer boom; Stress; Thin -walled element; Crack; Stress Intensity Factor; Simulation. 1. Introduction In modern agricultural production, the most common method to protect plants from weeds, pests and diseases is the use of pesticides. Depending on the type of pest, disease and weed control, there are several methods of applying chemical plant protection products, which are divided into spraying, dusting, aerosol treatment, etc. More than 75% of all chemical plant protection products are applied as aqueous solutions using sprayers of various types. Sprayers are machines that are used to spray fertilizers or chemicals in fields above the crop, through nozzles mounted on a long slender truss-like structure called boom. This boom is traditionally made of metal and can reach a length of up to 36 m from one end to another end (Vaddadi et al. (2021)). The sprayer boom is a large and complex rod-like structure, the quality and productivity of the process of applying a chemical to plants directly depends on its structure. It is important to control and minimize the vibration of the structure in the vertical and horizontal planes to ensure the uniformity of pulverization across the field. Due to the large width of the sprayer boom, its flexible behavior becomes significant. Even small deformations of the structure can cause considerable displacements at the boom ends because of its considerable width. However, there is not a clear correlation between the boom width and the amount of the spray boom motion (Manea et al. (2018)). The load-bearing structures of agricultural machinery operate under complex operational and terrain-climatic conditions. One of the main causes of the failure of machines used for chemical crop protection is the overload of their elements, which is usually due to an insufficient fatigue strength. Abstract In the paper, based on the CAD model of the field sprayer boom, a static and modal analysis of its stress-strain state (SSS) was performed. Characteristic features of the boom deformation were identified and zones of stress concentration in the lower chord of the boom were determined. Zones with increased structural stress concentration and plastic deformations caused by overloads are highly likely to become places of fatigue crack initiation due to the development of technological or operational microdefects. Based on the created digital model of the lower chord of the sprayer boom with a crack, the dependence of the stress intensity factor (SIF) on the crack length was determined. The mathematical expression for the correction function of the standard equation for determining the Mode I SIF for a symmetric crack in the lower chord of the field sprayer boom of the studied design was obtained. VIII International Conference “In - service Damage of Materials: Diagnostics and Prediction“ (DMDP 2025) Modeling of the Stress-Strain State of a Field Sprayer Boom with a Crack Mykola Stashkiv, Mykola Pidgurskyi, Andrii Babii, Ivan Pidgurskyi , *, Yuriy Humen Ternopil Ivan Puluj National Technical University, 56 Ruska St., Ternopil 46001, Ukraine

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +38(066) 837 27 31. E-mail address: ipidhurskyy@gmail.com

2452-3216 © 2026 The Authors. Copy from the contract: Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of DMDP 2025 organizers 10.1016/j.prostr.2026.03.026