Experiences of monitoring and predictive maintenance on agricultural machineries in central Italy

In this paper, the results of a large-scale investigation on agricultural machinery are reported. Such research has been based on some activities of monitoring and predictive aintenance carried out in twenty farms of Central Italy. In particular, the casual failures have been experimentally analyzed, during soil tillage operations, while the engine lubrication and tractor engine vibrations have been monitored. About the latter monitoring activities, the research motivation has consisted in the attempt to identify possible positive correlation between increases in the engine vibration and decrements in the tribological oil indices. According to this plan, a notebook has been compiled for each tractor, with the aim of keeping records of the tractor using hours, the quantities of diesel fuel and lubricant employed, in a given time, as well as of grease and filters. In such notebooks, the failures and the interventions have been enumerated and catalogued accordingly to their typologies, excluding those concerning the programmed maintenance operations on oil, filters, and belts. Visual, operational and instrumental controls have been recorded and elaborated in electronic form, in such a way to make failures and consumption charts available. This has been helpful to evaluate the productivity of the machine, since the costs sustained for each tractor and its idle time could be easily monitored.