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 complaints 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 it is not feasible to structurally improve the seat modal frequencies to meet the need for NVH issue resolution.
This paper presents a systematical study on the second-row luxury captain seat vibration issue between 10-25Hz with MPV vehicles. An axle contribution is analyzed with a 4-poster shaker test, and the test data show that the seat vibration is more sensitive 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 the 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. The CDC current effect on seat vibration is interpreted through a quarter-car suspension model in theory.