Mechanical Interactions Between Agricultural Machinery and Soil and Crop-Derived Media: Mechanisms, Modeling, and Engineering Applications

This review focuses on the basic mechanisms, media responses, modeling methods, and engineering applications of agricultural machinery–media interactions, and presents an integrated framework linking mechanical interaction mechanisms to equipment design and operational regulation. This review analyzes the transmission and dissipation mechanisms of mechanical loads in agricultural media. Typical responses in soil–machinery and crop–machinery interactions are summarized, with soil emphasis on cutting, disturbance, compaction, and residue coupling, and crop emphasis on cutting, bending, compression, impact, threshing, and grasping-induced damage. Subsequently, experimental characterization, discrete element method (DEM), multibody dynamics, and coupled modeling methods such as DEM–FEM and DEM–CFD are reviewed. On this basis, this review further discusses pathways for translating mechanical insights into engineering applications, including geometric structure optimization, material and surface engineering, operating parameter matching, low-damage equipment design, and adaptive machinery–media interactions. The above analysis indicates that existing research has increasingly linked material properties and interfacial interactions with numerical simulation and parameter calibration to equipment optimization and intelligent control. However, the cross-material and cross-condition transferability of models under complex field conditions, the computational efficiency of coupled models, and the cross-scale correlation between microdamage evolution and macroscopic agronomic effects remain the main challenges. Future work should integrate mechanism models, data-driven approaches and digital twins, and link machinery mechanical response with soil, crop and energy consumption indicators to support the design of low-disturbance, low-damage agricultural machinery.