Design and Verification of a Modular Reconfigurable Test Platform for Electric Tractors

Electric tractors (ETs) have attached significant attention in recent years due to the increasingly stringent exhaust emission policies all over the world. However, testing and evaluating all possible architectures and component sizes for ETs would be a time-consuming and expensive task. Establishing a comprehensive test bench that can implement different powertrain architectures as much as possible is thus an important and challenging task. In this study, a novel reconfigurable test platform is proposed according to the analysis results of the powertrain topologies of ETs. These results provide a verification platform to explore powertrain architecture options in future work. To be easily reconstructed under different architectures, the component installation and control system of this test platform was designed based on the modular, reconfigurable concept. To verify the feasibility of the reconfigurable test platform, two powertrain configurations were built based on this test platform framework. The rotary tillage experiments were conducted on these two configurations. The results show that the proposed reconfigurable test bench is reasonably practicable. Moreover, the control precision of the established test bench is demonstrated by comparing the torque results obtained from the experiment with the reference torque values, which indicated that this test bench also has the potential to be adapted to complex farming work scenarios.