Evaluation of the Isolation Efficiency of Quasi–Zero Stiffness Structure in Improving Seat Comfort of Different Commercial Vehicles

Different commercial vehicles, such as the sunflower harvester, tracked vehicle, and vibratory roller, operate across off-road and on-road environments, often encountering rough and poorly maintained surface conditions. Thus, their comfort and working efficiency are very low. To solve this problem, a quasi–zero stiffness structure (QZSS) is investigated and added to traditional seat suspensions in the sunflower harvester, tracked vehicle, and vibratory roller to improve their comfort and working efficiency. From their established dynamic models, the isolating efficiencies and stabilities of QZSS are then analyzed in detail under different conditions of speed and seat mass. Reducing the root-mean-square values of the seat acceleration (a_w) and displacement (z_w) is used to evaluate the results. The research shows that the comfort of the sunflower harvester and vibratory roller is very poor compared with the tracked vehicle under the same simulation conditions. By adding QZSS to their seat suspension system, the values of {a_w and z_w} in the sunflower harvester, tracked vehicle, and vibratory roller are strongly reduced by {67.9% and 38.8%}, {54.7% and 23.9%}, and {65.4% and 34.3%} in comparison without QZSS. Therefore, the comfort of the three vehicle models is greatly improved in comparison without QZSS. Besides, QZSS improves the vibratory roller’s comfort better than the tracked vehicle, while QZSS improves the sunflower harvester’s comfort to be the best. These study results further strengthen the isolation efficiency of QZSS on different commercial vehicles. This contributes to providing more applicability of QZSS in real vehicle conditions.