Agricultural Tractor Cabin Structure Design for Durability and Rollover Protective Structure Test Mahindra and Mahindra Limited

Format:

Conference/Event

Author/Creator:

Kumar, Kumar, author.

Contributor:

Chellan, Jagadeesan

Darekar, Sudhir

Kumar, K Ashok

Mahajan, Arun

Prasanth, S.

Ranjith Kumar, Jeya Kumar

Conference Name:

Symposium on International Automotive Technology 2015 (2015-01-21 : Pune, India)

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Warrendale, PA SAE International 2015

Summary:

AbstractA cabin on an agricultural tractor is meant to protect the operator from harsh environment, dust and provide an air conditioned space. As it is an enclosed space, cabin structure should be a crashworthiness structure and should not cause serious injury to operator in case of tractor roll over. There are International standard like OECD Code 4, SAE J2194 which regulates the crashworthiness of this protective structure. The roll-over protective structure (ROPS) is characterized by the provision of space for a clearance zone large enough to protect the operator in case of tractor overturn. None of the cabin parts should enter into the clearance zone for operator safety. In addition to meeting ROPS test criteria, the cabin structural strength should be optimized for the required tractor life.In this paper, simulation process has been established to design an agricultural tractor cabin structure and its mountings to meet the above requirements. A Design Verification Plan (DVP) has been developed consisting of 3 load cases. Loads and boundary conditions have been arrived at based on the OECD Code 4 and road and field excitations. Design acceptance criteria have been formulated for clearing the ROPS test and durability for the tractor life. Virtual validation has been done by performing (i) A non-linear elasto-plastic simulation in ABAQUS for ROPS test and (ii) Static and modal analysis in MSC Nastran for durability. For ROPS test, equivalent plastic strain approach has been used for predicting the crack initiation and for durability analysis, fatigue based approach has been used for predicting the life. Lab test has been done for the ROPS test and has been correlated with CAE results. At the end, further design iteration has been done for mass and cost reduction. Biggest challenge in this work was to meet the above criteria within the constraint of material availability and manufacturing limitation

Notes:

Vendor supplied data

Publisher Number:

2015-26-0163

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license