Seating and ride comfort for a driver during a test drive are the vital factors when making the decision for a new vehicle. Typically, big test series with test drivers are carried out for static and dynamic seat comfort in the lab and for riding comfort on specified road profiles considering all relevant scenarios. The amount of subjectivity involved in the evaluation of the comfort reduces the reliability of such studies to serve as a basis for design.
Numerical simulations represent a cost-effective, yet highly reliable method to evaluate the seating and the ride comfort. There exist several approaches using FEA (finite element analysis) for seating comfort and MBS (multi body system) analysis for riding comfort. Although both parts influence each other there exist no real interfaces between the different types of analysis.
This paper presents a numerical approach to the analysis of the impact of vibrations on the human body arising from real excitations of the whole vehicle. It represents an interface between seating comfort, where the occupant and the seat are considered separately in isolation from the rest of the vehicle, and ride comfort, where the occupant is subjected to real vibrations arising from the rest of the vehicle. Here, a standard FE-model of the human body, CASIMIR m50 on an automobile seat typically used for static and dynamic seating comfort in Abaqus, [3], is converted into a substructure and used to evaluate the ride comfort in SIMPACK, [8] via the MBS approach.