Tractor performance was analyzed using the data from 226 Korean-made and 107 imported tractors tested at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering for the 25-year period from 1980 through 2004. The performance analysis included the specific volumetric fuel consumption (svfc), power per unit weight and traction coefficient evaluated from the viewpoint of PTO power level. No significant performance improvement has been made for the Korean-made tractors over the last 25 years. The average svfc for the maximum PTO power has increased by only $2.1\%$ from 1980 to 2004, resulting in 2.86 kW${\cdot}$h/L in 2004. The average maximum PTO and drawbar power per unit weight of ballasted tractors were 1.38 and 1.19 kW/kN in 2000-2004, indicating $14.0\%$ and $5.9\%$ decreases respectively from 1980 to 2004. The traction coefficient has increased by $23.1\%$ over the 25 years, resulting in 0.68 in the 2000-2004 period. Poor performance improvement was also observed from the imported tractors. In the 2000-2004 period, average svfc for the maximum PTO power, PTO power per unit ballasted weight, drawbar power per unit ballasted weight and traction coefficient of the imported tractors were respectively 3.0 kW${\cdot}$h/L, 1.34 kW/kN, 1.13 kW/kN and 0.68. PTO and drawbar power per unit weight were lower in imported tractors than the Korean-made tractors. Comparing the test results with those of tractors less than 37 kW tested at the Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory from 1981 to 2002, the Korean-made tractors have exhibited better performance in terms of power per unit weight. However, poor performance in the svfc and traction coefficient was observed. The average svfc and traction coefficient of the Korean-made tractors were respectively $86.4\%$ and $83.7\%$ of the tractors tested at the NTTL over the same period.

In this study, the electronic power steering control system was developed and it was carried out to investigate experimentally the effect of the steering force for the on-road and off-road. The electronic power steering control system was engineered new trend system of power steering control system for tractor. It was composed of the electronic controller, detector, motor and mechanism mounted on tractor chassis. It was tested at the field in condition of tractor traveling speed 0 km/h, 3 km/h, 8 km/h, 11 km/h, 15 km/h, 18 km/h, 22 km/h, 25 km/h for measuring a maximum steering force. As a speed of tractor increased, a steering force decreased regardless of on-road or off-road. In addition, it is sufficiently a possibility of application of the steering system of tractor.

The pesticide is raising public interest in the world, because it causes damage to an environmental pollution and the human health remaining agricultural products and an ecosystem, in spite of the advantages. Particularly, each country restricts the residual pesticide and induces observance about the safety and usage standard so that they can control the amount of pesticide used and defend the safety of agricultural products. The habitual practice for the analysis of the residual pesticide depends on GC (gas chromatography), HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) and GC/MS (gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy), which triturate the fixed quantity of samples, abstract and purify as a suitable organic solvent. These methods have the highly efficient in aspects of sensitivity and accuracy. On the other hand, they need the high cost, time consuming, much effort, expensive equipment and the skillful management. Carbofuran is highly toxic by inhalation and ingestion and moderately toxic by dermal absorption. As with other carbamate compounds, it is metabolized in the liver and eventually excreted in the urine. The half-life of carbofuran on crops is about 4 days when applied to roots, and longer than 4 days if applied to the leaves. This research was conducted to develop immunoassay for detecting carbofuran residue quickly on the basis of surface plasmon resonance and to evaluate the measurement sensitivity. Gold chip used was CM5 spreaded dextran on the surface. An applied antibody to Immunoassay was GST (glutathione-s-transferase). The association and the dissociation time were 176 second and 215 second between GST and carbofuran. The total analysis time using surface plasmon resonance was 13 minutes including regeneration time, on the other hand HPLC and GC/MS was 2 hours usually. The minimum detection limit of a permissible amount for carbofuran in the country is 0.1 ppm. The immunoassay method using surface plasmon resonance was 0.002 ppm.

Major quality features of the beef carcass in most countries including Korea are size, marbling state of the lean tissue, color of the fat and lean tissue, and thickness of back fat of the 13th rib. To evaluate the beef quality, extracting loin parts from the sectional image of the 13th beef rib is crucial and is the first step. However, because of the inhomogeneous distribution and fuzzy pattern of the fat and lean tissues on the beef cut, it is difficult to extract automatically the proper contour of the lean tissue. In this paper, a prototype mobile beef quality measurement system, which can be implemented practically at the beef processing site was developed. The developed system was composed of the hand held image acquisition unit and mobile processing unit mounted with touch-pad screen. Algorithms to extract the boundary of the lean tissue and a proper tool to evaluate the marbling status have been developed using color image processing. The boundary extraction algorithm showed successful results for the beef cuts with simple and moderate patterns of the lean tissue and fat. However, it had some difficulty in eliminating complex pattern of the extraneous tissues adhered to the lean tissue in the boundary extraction. The developed algorithms were implemented to the prototype mobile processing unit.

Paper angle, environment friendly packaging material, has been mainly used as an edge protector, But, in the future, paper angle will be applied to package design of heavy product such as strength reinforcement or unit load system (ULS). Therefore. understanding of buckling behavior fur angle itself, compression strength and quality standard are required. The objectives of this study were to characterize the buckling behavior by theoretical and finite element analysis, and to develop compression strength model by compression test for symetric and asymetric paper angle. Based on the result of theoretical and finite element analysis, as applied load level was bigger and/or the length of angle was longer, incresing rate of buckling of asymmetric paper angle was higher than that of symmetric paper angle. Decreasing rate of minimum principal moment of inertia significantly increased as the extent of asymmetric angle increased, and buckling orientation of angle was open- direction near the small web. Incresing rate of maximum compression strength (MCS) for thickness of angle decreased as the web size increased in symmetric angle. MCS of asymmetric angle of 43${\times}$57 and 33${\times}$67 decreased $15{\~}18\%$ and $65{\~}78\%$, and change of buckling increased $12{\~}13\%$ and $62{\~}66\%$, respectively.

This is a fundamental study to develop a bio-gas utilization technology using livestock manure. Especially, this study was carried out to develop an engine using bio-gas. A bio-gas engine was designed and manufactured by modification of a diesel engine of 3 cylinders powering 13.31 kW/2800 rpm, changing the fuel supplying system fit for bio-gas. The result showed that, when the Air/Fuel ratio was controlled with fixed spark timing, the power of biogas-fueled engine is about $10.6{\~}14.6\%$ lower then that of LNG-fueled engine because of low volumetric efficiency. The engine output and torque was $11.85{\~}13.3$ kW, $39.5{\~}40.8\;N{\cdot}m$, respectively at the engine speed of 2600 rpm. Bio-gas consumption rate was 260.20 g/kW/hr, 315.20 g/kW/hr in engine speed or 1000 rpm, 2800 rpm, respectively.

Precision agriculture attempts to improve cropping efficiency by variable application of crop treatments such as fertilizers and pesticides, within field on a point-by-point basis. Therefore, a more complete understanding of the relationships between yield and soil properties is of critical importance in precision agriculture. In this study, the functional relationships between measured soil properties and rice yield were investigated. A supervised back-propagation neural network model was employed to relate soil chemical properties and rice yields on a point-by point basis, within individual site-years. As a results, a positive correlation was found between practical yields and predicted yields in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 are 0.916, 0.879, 0.800 and 0.789, respectively. The results showed that significant overfitting for yields with only the soil chemical properties occurred so that more of environmental factors, such as climatological data, variety, cultivation method etc., would be required to predict the yield more accurately.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the bump crossing and loading stability of a proto-type mini-forwarder under development. The evaluation was performed by computer simulation using a multi-body dynamic analysis program, Recur- Dyn 5.21. The proto-type was modeled and its properties such as mass, mass center, and mass moment of inertia were determined using 3D CAD modeler, Solid Edge 8.0. The $\%$ errors of masses, mass center, mass moment of inertia, and vertical motion of the model were within less than $10\%$ and the model's behavior agreed relatively well with those of the proto-type when traversing over a rectangular bump. Using the validated model, bump crossing of the proto-type was simulated and the loading limit was determined. It was found that effects of the shapes of bump on the bump crossing performance was insignificant within the practical heights of bumps. Stability of bump crossing increased with loading. However, loading of longer logs than 2.7 m made the crossing unstable because the ends of logs contacted ground when traversing over the bump. The maximum loading capacity of the proto-type was estimated to be 7.8 kN of 2.7 m long logs.