Research Progress on Failure Mechanisms and Durability of Rubber Tracks Under Complex Agricultural Operating Conditions

Rubber tracks are widely used on agricultural tractors, harvesters and lightweight field platforms due to their low ground-contact pressure, adaptability to uneven terrain and effective vibration attenuation. Under complex agricultural operating conditions with alternating soft/wet soil, straw cover, hard field ridges and gravel, tracks are subjected to combined tensioning, drive engagement, road-wheel compression, steering shear and cyclic bending, in which abrasive wear, fatigue cracking and rubber–reinforcement debonding usually develop together, critically affecting service life and reliability. Following the evidence chain of “operating condition–load–damage–life”, this review systematically summarizes the research progress on the failure mechanisms and durability of rubber tracks under complex agricultural operating conditions. It first summarizes typical service conditions and the spatial–temporal non-uniformity of track loads and the main failure modes and clarifies the many-to-many relationships between operating conditions and failures. It then analyzes damage evolution from four aspects: frictional wear and surface damage, fatigue crack initiation and propagation, rubber–reinforcement interface and composite failure, and coupling of multiple failure modes, highlighting geometric thinning, temperature rise and stiffness degradation as key feedback pathways accelerating late-stage damage. Furthermore, it reviews the scope and limitations of durability testing and damage characterization, numerical simulation (finite element, multibody dynamics and discrete element methods), fatigue and wear life prediction, and data-driven remaining useful life prediction. Finally, influencing factors are summarized from material, structural, operational and environmental aspects, together with multi-objective optimization design strategies. The analysis shows that although mature methodological systems exist in tire wear and rubber fatigue research, agricultural rubber tracks still lack a complete evidence chain connecting field load spectra, local damage and whole-track life, with distorted accelerated tests, poor cross-condition generalization and scarce field damage data as the main bottlenecks. Future research should prioritize reproducible field load spectra and unified test protocols, hierarchical accelerated testing that preserves failure mechanisms, and mechanism-constrained data-driven life prediction models, so as to support rubber track design that balances durability and soil protection across agricultural scenarios.