Grant: Engage Grants Program

Seats in vehicles and/or aircrafts act as vibration isolators to minimize and/or eliminate the vibration transmission from the vehicle's and/or aircraft's structure to the human body during motion. Therefore, the dynamic comfort of a seat can be expressed in terms of its vibration isolation efficiency. Several factors affect this efficiency such as seat design, level and frequency of vibrations, and seat occupant weight, height, and build. Since the design of each vehicle and/or aircraft is unique, it is necessary to measure the vibration transmissibility and use it to determine the seat vibration isolation efficiency in order to ensure satisfactory level of dynamic seat comfort during the design stage. However, the relationship between the measured vibration transmissibility and the human perception of comfort is not yet clear. Therefore, a strategic collaboration between the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and Bombardier Inc. will be established to develop an experimental program to investigate the dynamic characteristics of aircraft seats and develop a criterion that can be used to effectively correlate these characteristics with the human perception of comfort, and thereby improve the dynamic seat comfort. The first phase of this collaboration will be completed using the ENGAGE grant and its main objective is to measure the dynamic characteristics of an aircraft seat in laboratory using the multi-axis shaker table (MAST) at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). The results will be compared against similar measurements that were conducted in-flight and any necessary adjustments to the experimental set-up will be made until the laboratory results closely match those taken in actual flight conditions. The gained knowledge from this part would provide an effective technique for measuring and improving the dynamic seat comfort in aircrafts.