Soil-Machine Interactions

Aiming to improve work efficiency in such areas as tillage in agriculture, earth-moving in civil engineering, and tunnel-making in sea-bed operations, this work offers an introduction to Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis of soil-machine systems. It explains the advantage of FEM's numerical approach over traditional analytical and empirical methods of dealing with complex factors from nonlinear mechanical behaviour to geometric configurations. Basic procedures in a finite element analysis; constitutive models for agricultural soils; simulation of soil-metal interfaces; algorithms in static, dynamic, linear and non-linear finite element analyses; examples of soil-tool; programming techniques for finite element analyses.