Objective
Objectives and content
Vehicle comfort is a growing concern of the driving
public, with marketing studies consistently pointing to
comfort as a decisive factor determining vehicle sales.
Comfort is also a very important health and safety
concern. Use of uncomfortable vehicles leads to large
medical and welfare costs to society, and these costs are
destined to rise in the coming years as the average age
of the EU driver increases.
It has long been recognised that the seat system plays a
fundamental role towards determining the comfort of the
whole vehicle. The main objective of this RTD project is
to develop a Seat Vibrational Comfort Testing procedure
(SVCTP). The reason for proposing this RTD project is
that few test procedures currently exist in industry, and
no international standards define a complete procedure.
Fundamental issues such as how to choose mission signals,
how to treat the non-linear behaviour of the person/seat
system and how to choose human test subjects are
completely lacking from all existing national and
international standards. Vehicle and seat system
manufacturers currently cannot compare test results
obtained by different laboratories or exchange data.
This situation is economically damaging because it adds
large additional costs to vehicle and seat development
programs by eliminating chances for concurrent
engineering. The industrial importance of developing the
SVCTP can be appreciated from the list of partners
involved in this project: 2 automobile manufacturers, a
heavy vehicle manufacturer, a test centre, 2 seat system
manufacturers, an SME which provides vibro acoustic test
systems and services and 3 university research groups.
The wide range of activities represented by the
consortium members gives an idea of the large need being
addressed by this RTD project. The group will push for
making the SVCTP a recognised test standard on project
completion.
SCOOP is structured into 5 Workpackage. Workpackage 1
measures seat vibration missions for the full range of
vehicles from small cars to heavy lorries, and will
define an algorithm for synthesising vibration missions
from large amounts of road data. Workpackage 2
investigates mission reproduction in the laboratory and
will develop a next generation real-time vibration
controller. Workpackage 3 investigates the role of the
human test subject, and will define the best possible
comfort criteria to use, how to choose small test juries
(to save time and money) and the constraints arising from
the need to guarantee postural comfort. Workpackage 4
will develop vibration models of the person/seat system,
both for quantifying the effects of vibrations on the
body and for Ride Comfort simulation. The models will
define a condensed set of seat and body parameters for
simulation, optimisation and data exchange. Workpackage
5 assembles all project results to implement and validate
the SVCTP. Implementation and validation will occur in
the laboratories of several consortium members such that
the effectiveness of the SVCTP can be verified in the
work environments of automobile manufacturers, heavy
vehicle manufacturers and test centres.
SCOOP is an EUCAR (European Council for Automotive
Research & Development) project inserted in the thematic
group concerned with Vehicle Technologies. The project
is specifically addressing the issue of vehicle comfort.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
3001 Heverlee
Belgium