A unique human model to simulate various types of seat (dis)comfort

Abstract

Human models combined with virtual prototypes is increasingly used by seat and interior engineers in both automotive and aeronautic industries. Testing virtually a seat design enables to anticipate potential discomfort issues, to compare seat variants through repeatable test procedures and this for a wide range of seat occupants’ anthropometries. As comfort feeling is related to lots of factors, human models used for such virtual seat test must cover not only static comfort, through posture and pressure mapping evaluations, but also body vibration transmission related to external perturbations, and human thermal comfort sensation. This paper will describe the different steps of development of these finite elements human models, from the initial collaboration with Hong-Ik University to select the targeted human anthropometries until the validation of their capabilities to predict the static (dis)comfort while seating in a virtual seat prototype. It will then detail the work done to capture also the physical phenomena related to the dynamic comfort, when a seat is submitted to some vibrations. This paper will also present the latest developments to include the prediction of thermal comfort. Then, typical applications using those human models in interaction with virtual seat prototypes will be shown and will highlight the interest of a unique human model for prediction in diverse discomfort evaluations, such as static, dynamic and thermal comfort. Finally, the last part will demonstrate the influence of human anthropometries for the static and dynamic comfort evaluation.