A Study of Reduction in the Vibrations of Steering Wheel of Agricultural Tractor

Steering wheel vibration is one of the major factor in determining the operator’s comfort in an agricultural tractor. Over the past 20 years automobile quality and consumer perceptions and demands have been an increasing part of the vehicle engineering process. This project deals with study of vibration related issues in steering wheel of tractor. The design and analysis of steering system plays a major role for determining the root cause for the problem. Main sources of steering wheel vibration are found to be engine imbalance, resonance of steering system, lesser damping, road / field induced vibration. Steering vibration study was conducted on various tractor models and one tractor was identified for improvement. Upon detailed analysis on that particular tractor, it was found that the resonance of steering system with engine excitation is the root cause for excessive vibration. Various methods such as shifting the natural frequency away from the second order engine frequency and increasing damping coefficient to reduce the vibration amplitude at resonance are considered to reduce vibrations due to resonance. Axial damper concept is used for vibration reduction. Analysis is done in Matlab Simulink with two degree of freedom model with base excitation