A Study on Luxury Captain Seat Vibration in MPV Vehicles with Semi-active Suspension

More and more captain-seat-like, luxury individual seats have been appeared inside MPV vehicles in order to meet various customer needs and improve market competitiveness. In the same time, customer complains about seat vibration also increase significantly. Thus, luxury captain seat vibration is becoming MPV issues facing the vehicle development engineers. Typically, luxury captain seats are much heavier due to the added mechanisms to provide functions like massage or temperature controls, etc. and thus it is not feasible to structurally improve the seat modal frequencies to meet the traditional requirements. This paper presents a systematical study on second row luxury captain seat vibration issue between 10-25 Hz with 2 MPV vehicles. An axle contribution is analyzed with a 4-poster bench test, and the test data show that the seat vibration is more sensitivity to rear axle excitation than that of front axle, and to the out-of-phase excitation than the in-phase one. The similar results are displayed by a coherence analysis of on-road test data. It also discusses effects of a continuous Damping Control (CDC) shock absorber and air spring tuning on the seat vibration, and the engineering resolutions for the development of the suspension, body and seat.