Abstract
To describe the comfort performances of driver-vehicle-interfaces in passenger vehicles (e.g. seat and steering wheel), it is necessary to investigate the human vibration perception for such interfaces. There are already some psychophysical values such as perception threshold for seat vibration in existing standards and previous studies. However, these values show significant differences from each other. A possible cause is that these studies were carried out with different methods and under different conditions depending on the observed phenomena and the research targets. Therefore nowadays there are few generally applicable standard specifications for analysing the perception of vehicle vibrations.
In this paper, the psychophysical study is carried out under customer-oriented and realistic conditions. In a series of experiments, eight professional engineers as subjects assess vibrations at seat, steering-wheel and foot space in a real passenger vehicle. The vehicle is excited by an electrodynamic shaker. The vibration amplitude extends from the perception thresholds up to the values occurring in real driving conditions. Psychophysical values at driver-vehicle-interfaces are derived by analysing the subjective assessments and the simultaneous objective measurements.
KEYWORDS – Perception threshold, Equivalent comfort contours, Driver-Vehicle-Interfaces, Passenger vehicle vibrations, Frequency dependence