The comfort of seats increasingly becomes a crucial factor in the overall driving
experience, particularly as vehicles become increasingly integrated into
people’s daily lives. Passengers often maintain a relatively fixed posture and
have close contact with the seat for extended periods of time, leading to issues
such as heat, humidity, and stickiness. In order to enhance the thermal comfort
experienced by occupants, manufacturers are no longer satisfied with ensuring
the thermal comfort performance of vehicles only through the HVAC system in the
cabin, but also developed a microclimate control seat that adjusts the
temperature through ventilation between the contact surface of the seat and the
human body, trying to improve the thermal comfort of passengers more
effectively. However, the ventilation ducts of these seats are commonly designed
based on empirical or autonomous standards, and their effectiveness is
subsequently assessed through test or simulation, typically under unloaded
conditions. This approach fails to account for the impact of seat deformation on
ventilation performance during actual use, resulting in a discrepancy between
the intended design and the actual experience. This research aims to address
this issue by using simulation methods to compare the deformation of ventilation
ducts and their impact on ventilation performance in both unloaded and loaded
seats. The findings reveal significant differences between the two conditions,
highlighting the importance of considering seat deformation in the design of
more precise microclimate control. Meanwhile, a simple simulation scheme was
proposed for performance testing of seat ventilation.
