Human Response to Vibrations and Its Contribution to the Overall Ride Comfort in Automotive Vehicles - A Literature Review

The various factors that affect ride comfort, including noise, vibrations and harshness (NVH) have been in focus in many research studies due to an increasing demand in ride comfort in the automotive industry. Vibrations have been highlighted as an important contribution to assess and predict overall ride comfort. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to explain ride comfort with respect to vibration for the seated occupant based on a systematic literature review of previous fundamental research and to relate these results to the application in the contemporary automotive industry. The results from the literature study show that numerous research studies have determined how vibration frequency, magnitude, direction, duration affect human response to vibration. Also, the studies have highlighted how body posture, age, gender and anthropometry affect the human perception of comfort. An analysis was made of the consistency and inconsistency of the results obtained in the different studies. The deviations of the research results from real-world ride comfort in automotive vehicles were analyzed and divided into three groups: appreciable and consistent with industry results, appreciable and inconsistent with industry results and not appreciable in industrial results. The overall conclusion from this literature study was that there is much information available from laboratory studies regarding human response to vibrations, but there is a lack of studies that take into account all the different parameters that affect the overall ride comfort experience for automotive vehicle occupants.