Comfort Enhancement for Tractor Drivers in Agricultural Field using Semi Active Seat Suspension

Since the invention of tractors agriculture tasks has been become much easier than manual ways. The preparation of soil for crop production known as tillage is now less time consuming now. But as the surface of fields where tractors are used for tillage is very uneven. As tractors has no suspension systems other than rubber tyres so drivers feel very uncomfortable while driving tractors. As vibrations are transmitted to tractor seats there is always a risk of health hazards. Tractor seats are under the influence of small frequency vibrations up to 7Hz and as per international standards vibrations in the range of 4Hz to 6Hz are most dangerous. The present study is focused to reduce the vibrations at tractor seat with active control strategies while working in the fields with tillage equipment's. The experiment was carried out for different forward speeds of the tractor. The PID and Fuzzy logic controllers have been designed and implemented on the tractor seat. The conventional damper of tractor seat has been replaced with MR damper. The output of controllers is the voltage to command the MR damper which controls the vibrations at the seat base. The input to the controllers is the surface roughness. The results of passive and active system has been compared and it was concluded that the vibrations at the seat base has been drastically reduced by 26%.