Abstract
Recently, an improvement of ride comfort is essential for vehicle designs to add commodity value. A technique to well estimate the ride comfort for vehicle passengers is strongly required from the above viewpoint. This paper investigates the modeling of a passenger in order to predict the ride comfort by CAE approach. A passenger model on a rigid seat is constructed by multi-body approach having nineteen degrees of freedom. Unknown parameters are rotational springs and dampers connecting body elements, which are estimated so as to explain the dynamic behavior of human body when exposed to vibration. Frequency range of interest is from 0 to 3 Hz, at which the roll and lateral vibration of human body are dominant. This model can represent the vibration characteristics of the main two natural modes that human body has below 3 Hz. And the improvement of the accuracy of the estimation in the entire model is tried by means of incorporating the rotary actuator which is considered the function of the muscle in the linear model and determining the torque of the rotary actuator by the feedback from the postural control system.
