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The main objective of this research is to find a general empirical formula to predict vehicle frontal area applied to most types of vehicles. This was done on 21 vehicles; passenger cars, buses and trucks by calculating their frontal area by using image processing technique on cars photos extracted from catalogues. The software (Data Fit) is used to establish the required empirical formula. The results showed that the empirical formula is simple and accurate enough for finding out the vehicles frontal areas.

This paper presents a safety mechanism that is supposed to be used to enhance in the agricultural tractors. A tractor instability situation may be occurring when drawbar force becomes large enough to cause no load (weight) on its front axle. This endangers the tractor stability and the tractor will be overturned rearward. The proposed tractor safety mechanism is based on monitoring the location of tractor center of gravity and progressively shifting forward in a dead weight to counteract for the effect of tractors front lift-up. A laboratory tractor model has been developed in such a way that the lift of its front is sensed and accordingly a mechanism that shifts a movable dead weight ahead to the front a distance that automatically ensures its longitudinal stability. Such arrangement provides a solution that practically ensures longitudinal tractor stability in the situations when maximum drawbar-pull is suddenly developed.