Development of a new seat isolation system for ameliorating the driver’s ride quality

Abstract

This study proposes the seat’s three isolation systems including the three parallel isolations (TPI), the quasi-zero stiffness structure (QSS) embedded in the seat’s isolation system, and a combination of the QSS and TPI (QSS-TPI) for ameliorating the ride quality of the driver. From the dynamic models of the TPI, QSS, and QSS-TPI established, their parameters are optimized and simulated to compare the performance between the TPI, QSS, and QSS-TPI in isolating the driver’s vibration. The root mean square values of the vertical acceleration ( azs), pitching acceleration ( aφs), and rolling acceleration ( aθs) of the seat have been selected as the objective functions. With optimized parameters of TPI, QSS, and QSS-TPI optimized, the research results show that the vertical acceleration of the seat using the optimized QSS is lower than that of the optimized TPI, conversely, both the pitching and rolling seat accelerations using the optimized TPI have been strongly decreased compared to the optimized QSS. With the optimized QSS-TPI, the azs is greatly reduced by 55.84% in comparison with the optimized TPI while both the aφs and aθs are strongly decreased by 98.76% and 98.46% compared to the optimized QSS. This means that the seat’s QSS-TPI ameliorate the driver’s ride quality and shaking better than that of both the seat’s TPI and QSS. From the simple structure and isolation performance of the QSS-TPI proposed, the seat’s QSS-TPI should be applied to the seat’s isolation system to ameliorate the driver’s ride quality.