An Evaluation of Riding Comfort to Car Seat with a Digital Human

Abstract

The vibration behaviors of human body sitting in car seats that were made of polyurethane foam were simulated with a 3D digital human model using the finite element method. In this study, the experiments for evaluating riding comfort to the real seats and the numerical simulations with the digital human model which was developed to reproduce the real-seat-experiments were carried out in order to elucidate the relationships between the physical characteristics of the human body and the riding comfort. As a result, the human body vibrates mainly in the vertical direction at 2 and 4Hz, while the body tends to vibrate in the horizontal direction, in which it was confirmed that the behaviors were a coupling vibration to the vertical external periodical force according to the results of the simulation with the digital human model.