Design and Analysis of Fully-automatic Electromechanical Single Plate Clutch for Autonomous Agriculture Vehicle

Agriculture vehicles and farming equipment like tractors and Tillers, Sprayers etc., also use a similar automobile transmission. With the shortage in labor and also increase in labor expenses there is a trend to automate the farming equipment to save time and labor cost. The major challenges in automation is the clutch control which is presently manual, and the automatic clutch control in the high end vehicles cannot be used due to the high cost, complexity of design. Hence in order to carry out the automatic clutch control a special electro mechanical clutch is needed. The fully- automatic electromechanical Single plate clutch for autonomous agriculture spray vehicle is our attempt to design develop and apply the clutch to agriculture automation. The Clutch development includes the theoretical design as to the Power and torque transmission of the engine power and also design of an innovation clutch engagement-disengagement arrangement with quick-response, low cost, easy serviceability and compact space. The paper presents a brief overview of the clutch, design and analysis of the critical components like the flywheel, clutch plate and pressure plate, The components have been developed using Unigraphic Nx8 and the structural analysis has being done using Ansys Workbench 16.0 . The testing was carried out on the clutch using a test rig to determine the performance characteristic of the clutch.