Abstract:In response to the current lack of full power shift transmissions for heavy duty tractors and the issues of complex shifting operations, high fuel consumption, and poor adaptability in traditional tractors in China, a fully automated shifting transmission was designed for 220 kW tractors. Standard automatic shifting strategies for road transportation mode and plowing operation mode were developed based on the control core of economy and power for different working modes of tractors. These strategies enabled fully automatic shifting on the foundation of a full power shift transmission. To further enhance the adaptability of automatic shifting strategies under different working conditions, intelligent automatic shifting strategies were formulated. In the road transportation automatic shifting strategy, the total fuel consumption was taken as the optimization objective, with shifting point speed and shifting delay time serving as design variables. A genetic algorithm was employed to optimize the control strategy. In the plowing operation automatic shifting strategy, two corrective parameters, namely, slip rate variation and vehicle speed variation, were introduced to dynamically adjust the downshifting point speed by using fuzzy control rules. A tractor simulation model was built by using AMESim and Matlab/Simulink, and simulations of automatic shifting strategies under different working conditions were conducted. The simulation results demonstrated that compared with the standard automatic shifting strategy, the total fuel consumption of the tractor under the road transportation condition was decreased by 6.71%, while the number of shifts was decreased by 36.5% and the total fuel consumption was decreased by 2.85% under plowing operation conditions. Finally, the effectiveness of the road transportation mode automatic shifting strategy was validated through bench tests.