Energy Saving in the Hydraulic Circuit for Agricultural Tractors: Focus on the Power Supply Group

This work aims to analyze a complete hydraulic system of a medium size agricultural tractor, in order to perform an energy dissipation analysis and to suggest possibly alternative configurations and solutions. The fuel consumption and energy dissipation in off road vehicles have in fact become a key feature, given the great attention devoted to the need of reducing pollutant emissions, in order to satisfy the future emission limits. In this work the focus is on the fluid power supply group and the standard architecture of this unit has been compared with an alternative solution, called variable pump margin strategy and compared on the basis of the power consumption to perform the same duty cycle, showing that a relevant percentage of energy may be saved with simple modifications in the hydraulic power generator group