The arising health problems of operators of off-road vehicles point out that still a lot of effort has to be put into the design of effective seat and cabin suspensions. This paper reports of the development of a pneumatic cabin suspension for a combine harvester. The suspension consists out of four pneumatic elements, which make use of a classical air spring. The paper describes these elements in detail and develops a model using thermodynamics. The accuracy of the model is proven by performing the necessary measurements. Using those one dimensional models of the elements, a multi dimensional model of the cabin suspension can be set up. The purpose of the modeling is to be able to optimize certain parameters in the system and on the other hand to predict the comfort improvement the system is going to generate. A real physical system is build up and placed on a six degree of freedom hydraulic test rig. The evaluation of the suspension is performed by reproducing accelerations, measured during test drives with a combine harvester, by the test rig and evaluating the behaviour of the cabin suspension. The objective comfort parameters effective Root Mean Square and Vibration Dose Value are used to get a consistent way of evaluating the obtained results. Improvements in the objective comfort parameters up to 50 % were observed and therefore the pneumatic cabin suspension proposed here, proves to be a valuable asset towards an improvement of the low frequency vibration comfort on agricultural machinery.
Pneumatic cabin suspension for agricultural machinery
Pneumatische Kabinenaufhängung für landwirtschaftliche Maschinen
2004
8 Seiten, 5 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 13 Quellen
Conference paper
English