Analysis of agricultural machinery to reduce the vibration to the operator seat

The vibrations produced by an agricultural machinery are transmitted to the seat of the tractor’s operator, inducing comfort and safety problems. Vibrations must comply with the limitation imposed by the international and national regulations. The control of noise and vibration on the operator is of interest of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL). In this work, exploiting the dynamic substructuring techniques, the agricultural machinery is modeled by coupling the model of the tractor to a mounted machinery through the linkage system. The model is used to perform transient simulations in order to evaluate the exposition of the operator to the whole body vibrations according to the standards ISO 2631 and ISO 5008. The model of the tractor is validated by comparing its response on a standard track to the experimental response of a real tractor. Moreover, the effect of the suspension systems and of a mounted machinery on the vibration transmitted to the operator seat are investigated observing the transmissibil-ity from the wheels to the operator seat. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the vibration level to the suspension parameters is proposed in order to verify the possibility of further improvements in terms of vibration exposition.