Reliability analysis of agricultural machinery: A case study of sugarcane chopper harvester

Abstract

the performance of agricultural machines depends on the reliability of the machinery used, the operating environment, the maintenance efficiency, the operating process, the technical expertise of the farmers and etc. As the size and complexity of farm equipment continue to increase, the implications of equipment failure become over more critical. Therefore, reliability analysis is required to identify the bottlenecks in the system and to find the components or subsystems with low reliability for a given designed performance. It is important to select a suitable method for data collection as well as for reliability analysis. This paper presents a case study describing reliability and availability analysis of the sugarcane 7000 series chopper harvester at Hakim Farabi agro- industry in Iran. In this study, the harvester is divided into nine subsystems. The parameters of some probability distributions, such as weibull, exponential and lognormal distributions have been estimated by using ReliaSoft Weibull++6 software. The results of the analysis show that feed rollers and hydraulic subsystems are critical from a reliability point of view, and the wheels subsystem and hydraulic subsystem are critical from an availability point of view. The study also shows that the reliability analysis is very useful for deciding maintenance intervals.