Truck and Construction Seat BSR Identification and Characterization

Truck and construction seats offer a number of different challenges compared to automotive seats in the identification and characterization of Buzz, Squeak, and Rattle (BSR) noises. These seats typically have a separate air or mechanical suspension and usually a larger number and variety of mechanical adjustments and isolators. Associated vibration excitation tend to have lower frequencies with larger amplitudes. In order to test these seats for both BSR and vibration isolation a low-noise shaker with the ability to test to a minimum frequency of 1 Hz was employed. Slowly swept sine excitation was used to visualize the seat mode shapes and identify nonlinearities at low frequencies. A sample set of seat BSR sounds are described in terms of time and frequency characteristics, then analyzed using sound quality metrics.