Trends and Future Perspective of Electrification in Agricultural Tractor-Implement Applications

Francesco Mocera (), Aurelio Somà, Salvatore Martelli and Valerio Martini
Additional contact information
Francesco Mocera: Departiment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Aurelio Somà: Departiment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Salvatore Martelli: Departiment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Valerio Martini: Departiment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 18, 1-36

Abstract: The worldwide growing demand for food is pushing the agricultural field towards new innovative solutions to increase the efficiency and productivity of cultivations. In this direction, agricultural mechanization plays a crucial role, and tractors are among the most important actors. Agricultural tractors are machines designed to push/pull special instruments usually referred to as implements, to which they may transfer power by means of a mechanical power take-off (PTO) or via hydraulic connections, thanks to the availability of pressurized oil. The tractor can be seen as a mobile power station: the more efficiently it provides power to external implements or to the ground in terms of tractive effort, the higher will be the efficiency and productivity of a certain task. However, the growing demand for greener and sustainable work machines is pushing towards new concepts of tractor powertrains with the goal of reducing, as much as possible, the amount of pollutants and GHG emissions per unit of work. In this paper, the authors will propose a review of the current trends towards electrification of agricultural tractors. Electrification can help in making vehicles more efficient and opening a new scenario for work optimization. Moreover, electrification is also involving the implements attached to the tractor and responsible for actually performing a wide variety of field tasks. However, tractor electrification requires proper attention due to the impact of high power electric systems on the vehicle configuration. For this reason, a proper level of hybridization should be considered. In this paper, a new classification method will be proposed, considering the electrification level in terms of power and as a function of the installed electric energy storage. This definition will be applied to classify the current state of the art of electric and hybrid agricultural tractors, investigating current trends in the scientific community and among industrial manufacturers with a look to the new upcoming technologies.

Keywords: Non-Road Mobile Machineries; agricultural machinery; tractors; hybridization factor; hybrid electric vehicles; fuel cell vehicles; energy management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/18/6601/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/18/6601/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:18:p:6601-:d:1239268

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().