PSI - Issue 24

Francesco Mocera / Procedia Structural Integrity 24 (2019) 712–723 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000–000

719

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Fig. 7: CAN BUS acquisition system

In this work the attention was focused on three specific working tasks involving the Power-Take-O ff (PTO) of the tractor: the use of an atomizer, of a shredder and of a rotary harrow implement. All tests were performed with the ICE starting from its nominal operating temperature. Operations at cold start have slightly di ff erent behaviours which were not considered in this analysis. Most of the tractor operations are always started after the thermal engine reaches a good working temperature and oil recirculation.

5. HIL testing

In this work, the proposed parallel hybrid architecture for an orchard tractor and its control strategy architecture were tested on the designed HIL bench. The system was tested according to three working scenarios, derived from field characterization of the tractor activities. The chosen working scenarios consider the use of three di ff erent implements pulled to the tractor and taking power from it through its PTO system. In particular, the use of an atomizer for fertilizer deposition, the use of a shredding tool for green maintenance and the use of a rotary harrow superficial soil preparation were considered as case studies for this work. The proposed working scenarios had specific interesting characteristics in terms of average and peak power demand as shown in the summary reported in Tab. 1. The Atomizer load was characterized by a medium-high average power demand with almost a constant profile. The Shredding tool applied a medium-low load to the engine but with a higher di ff erence between the mean and the maximum power request. Finally, the Rotary Harrow demonstrated to be the heaviest load among the all, with peaks in the power demands that can saturate the available installed power for few seconds. Thus, the proposed case studies had the correct ingredients to test: the stability of the control architecture in di ff erent operating conditions, from low loads up to full loading conditions; the overall performance of the powertrain understanding if the joint cooperation of the ICE and of the EM could at least perform as well as the traditional power unit.

Table 1: Statistics of the considered PTO working scenario – Power (kW).

Atomizer

Shredder

Rotary Harrow

Min Max

34.5

12 26 19

35 52 44

40 36

Mean

The testing session were performed according to the following procedure: