Development of a Method to Evaluate Agricultural Tire-To-Soil Contact Properties
Date
2024-05
Authors
Sheriff, John
Major Professor
Tekeste, Mehari
Mirka, Gary
Advisor
Committee Member
Gary
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Abstract
Agricultural equipment size and weight have increased steadily over the past three years. The agricultural tire manufacturers had to adapt their tire technology for carrying tire loads and potentially reduce the machine induced soil compact from these heavier machines. In the early 2000s, standard radial ply tires designated as increased inflection (IF) and very high flection (VF) were introduced for agricultural machinery equipment that have carrying capacity 20% and 40% more load at the same tire inflation pressure as the standard radial ply tires, respectively. The typical method to compare tire size and tire inflation pressures at rated loads for potential soil compaction reduction is “gross flat plate” contact area. Contact area or gross flat plate is calculated from multiplying the overall length by the overall width of the tire’s footprint on smooth and rigid surface. Tire manufactures publish in their tire data book a contact area for agricultural tires at the rated load and tire inflation pressure, however, no industry standardized method is developed. The contact area measurement of smooth and rigid surface also fails to consider the tire’s flexibility and the soils’ ability to deform. In the current project a new proposed method to measure the 3D footprint in an artificial cohesive-frictional soil mixture to compare the differences between load conditions and tire inflation pressures of a VF tire equipped to 2022 Hagie STS12 self-propelled sprayer equipment is presented. Results from contact parameters measured from tire penetrated on artificial soil were also compared to the contact area estimated from tire footprint on hard surface. A 2022 Hagie STS12 self-propelled sprayer equipment was outfitted with four Alliance Agriflex+ 372 VF 710/70R42 tires in the study. Two tire inflation pressures were determined based on the tire manufacturer’s recommendations for field and road conditions at two tire loading conditions. The contact area from the tire-to-soil method was found to be 1.5 times larger than the hard surface print for the two tire loads and two tire inflation pressure settings. Lowering the tire inflation pressure resulted in statistically greater (p < 0.05) tire-to-soil contact properties (length and area) for the “full tank” load setting and shallower soil rut depth. No statistically significant difference by tire inflation pressure was found on footprint width. Reducing the tire inflation pressure for the “full tank” 53 kN tire load condition gave a 10 mm shallower maximum rut depth that was statistically significant (p < 0.05), suggesting operating at low tire inflation pressure reduces soil compaction. As a validation on how lowering tire inflation might benefit crop yield, biological corn yield data were compared from corn plants harvested from wheel trafficked and untrafficked lanes. The wheel traffic was created from the wheel pass of the Alliance Agriflex+ 372 VF 710/70R42 (trafficked) when the 2022 Hagie STS12 self-propelled sprayer 36-m boom applied chemicals pre-emergence. From the limited corn yield measurement of one-year crop season the biological corn yield from the sprayer trafficked lane showed a 15.6% yield reduction in the trafficked region compared to the untrafficked region. The soil bin study for measuring 3D contact parameters from tire loading on artificial cohesive-friction soil demonstrated that generating standardized tire-to-soil contact properties accounting the flexibility of tires and soil deformation is expected to benefit agricultural tire manufactures, heavy axle load equipment manufacturers and growers for precision soil compaction management and improving crop productivity. Further research will need to be conducted to investigate the impacts of trafficking at various tire inflation pressure on corn yield and economic benefits.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Copyright
2024