Investigation of Seat Suspensions with Embedded Negative Stiffness Elements for Isolating Bus Users' Whole-Body Vibrations
Paper in proceeding, 2021

Bus drivers are a group at risk of often suffering from musculoskeletal problems, such as low-back pain, while bus passengers on the last-row seats experience accelerations of high values. In this paper, the contribution of K-seat in decreasing the above concern is investigated with a detailed simulation study. The K-seat model, a seat with a suspension that functions according to the KDamper concept, which combines a negative stiffness element with a passive one, is benchmarked against the conventional passive seat (PS) in terms of comfort when applied to different bus users' seats. More specifically, it is tested in the driver's and two different passengers' seats, one from therear overhang and one from the middle part. For the benchmark shake, both are optimized by applyingexcitations that correspond to real intercity bus floor responses when it drives over a real road profile. Then a human model is placed on the seats in order to compare their optimum solutions in terms of the user's whole-body vibrations (WBVs), using objective comfort metrics. Based on the results, the K-seat improves significantly the comfort of the users (~92%) compared to the PS, while it achieves a similar decrease in the maximum values of the user's back accelerations (~97%).

Comfort

Low-back pain

Whole-body vibrations

Bus users

Seats

Negative-stiffness

Author

Georgios Papaioannou

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Dragan Sekulic

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Vehicle Engineering and Autonomous Systems

Efstathios Velenis

Cranfield University

Ioannis Antoniadis

National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

SAE Technical Papers

01487191 (eISSN)

2021

SSAE 2021 Automotive Technical Papers, WONLYAUTO 2021
Warrendale, USA,

Subject Categories

Transport Systems and Logistics

Infrastructure Engineering

Vehicle Engineering

DOI

10.4271/2021-01-5019

More information

Latest update

1/12/2022