Approach for Parameter Determination for Objective Comfort Evaluation of the Vehicle Vibration Induced by Powertrain

The driving comfort influences the customer purchase decision; hence it is an important aspect for the vehicle development. To better quantify the comfort level and reduce the experiment costs in the development process, the subjective comfort assessment by test drivers is nowadays more and more replaced by the objective comfort evaluation. Hereby the vibration comfort is described by scalar objective characteristic parameters that correlate with the subjective assessments. The correlation analysis requires the assessments and measurements at different vehicle vibration. To determine the objective parameters regarding the powertrain excitations, most experiments in the previous studies were carried out in several test vehicles with different powertrain units. Due to the different features among test vehicles, the subjective assessments and the objective measurements are influenced by further interfering factors, such as different wheel excitations between vehicles, which lead to an inevitable variance.

This paper presents a new approach for determination of the objective parameters for vehicle vibrations caused by powertrain. This approach is performed in a real vehicle on the vehicle roller test bench. By using various measures (powertrain variants), the vehicle vibrations are selectively modified in such a way that the effects can be both objectively measured and subjectively perceived. For each variant, professional test drivers assess vibration comfort for seat and steering wheel. Through correlation analysis the objective parameters are determined.