Prospects of Hybrid Systems on Agricultural Machinery

“Hybrid system” is an actual catchword and it has entered agricultural engineering. Many projects dealing with electric drives on agricultural machines have been presented in the recent years. Their advantages are exact controllability, speed variability and overload capability. So called agro-hybrid-structures can be derived from automotive-hybrid-systems. The functionality strongly depends on the structure of the system. The use of electric drives appears to be promising in dedicated applications, where infinitely variable hydrostatic drives can be replaced and new functionalities can be realized. This paper considers selected hybrid-structures and -functions on the example of a tractor. Furthermore the potential of electric drives from the view of European manufacturers of agricultural machinery is reported