Assessments of two dynamic manikins for laboratory testing of seats under whole-body vibration

The aptness of two anthropodynamic manikins for assessing vibration isolation effectiveness of suspension seats is evaluated through laboratory measurements. The evaluations were performed using five different suspension seats exposed to idealized white noise (0.5–20 Hz) and target vehicle excitations along the vertical axis using a whole-body vehicular vibration simulator. The measurements were performed to derive acceleration transmissibility and seat effective amplitude transmissibility (SEAT) characteristics of seats loaded with: human subjects of body masses in the vicinity of 55, 75 and 98 kg; manikins configured to same masses; and equivalent rigid masses. The dynamic responses of the manikins were also measured under different magnitudes of white-noise excitations and expressed in terms of apparent mass. The relative applicability of the manikins for selected seats was evaluated by comparing the measures with those obtained for the seat–human and seat–mass systems. The comparisons suggested that the SEAT measures attained with manikins are comparable with those obtained with equivalent rigid mass, irrespective of the body mass, for the low natural frequency seats (⩽2 Hz) considered in the study. Both the manikins and the equivalent rigid masses, however, provided an overestimate of isolation effectiveness of seats, when compared to those with human subjects. The manikins resulted in better estimates of SEAT values for high natural frequency seats than the rigid mass. The dynamic responses of manikins were also compared with the ranges of standardized values reported in ISO-5982 and DIN-45676. The results revealed considerable differences between the biodynamic responses of manikins and the standardized ranges.