Abstract
Keywords - ride comfort, comfort assessment, vehicle vibrations, human keyword, subjective and objective correlation
The issue of ride comfort and its assessment plays an important rule in the vehicle design process. Current standard approaches are more or less focused on passive explanation of the human body behaviour and one-directional vibrations. The presented paper introduces two types of experiments performed in order to study ride comfort issues more deeply in order to be able to assess the vehicle comfort in the early development stages.
In order to study the interaction between the vehicle and its occupant, a set of experiments was performed, in which typical ride manoeuvres took place on a test field and data was acquired both from the vehicle on-board sensors and sensors on the human occupant. Together 38 signals describing the vehicle and occupant states were captured; among the others the occupant´s muscular activity was measured with electromyography (EMG) as well as occupant´s motion in the vehicle measured with accelerometers and cameras. One of the objectives of the presented measurements was also to indicate the influence of the visual information on the occupant behaviour. The experiments have been also used for the identification of the influence of the visual information on the occupant behaviour.
For the comparison of the subjective and objective vehicle assessment a group of test persons evaluated a set of test vehicles from different OEMs. The subjective evaluation was based on several ride comfort indicators. Furthermore, the group of the test persons was complemented with the professional test drivers. The objective information on the vehicle vibration level was captured with 16 accelerometers together with a special device evaluating comfort on the seat according to the ISO 2631-1. Both evaluations were performed on the same test circuit consisting of typical road profiles ranging from a country road to a motorway.