A Literature Survey of Biodynamic Models for Whole Body Vibration and Vehicle Ride Comfort

Vehicle ride comfort plays an important role in the vehicle design. Human body is very sensitive to whole body vibration. Vehicle ride comfort has brought lots of concerns in recent years due to requirement of better ride comfort performance for newly developed vehicles. Vehicle ride comfort has a direct effect on driver’s performance and will result in overall customer satisfaction. Various papers have reported vehicle ride comfort and various biodynamic models have been built in the literature. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive literature survey to summarize all biodynamic models for whole body vibration and vehicle ride comfort. The purpose of this paper is to have a literature review of biodynamic models. So this paper initially focuses on various health issues due to whole body vibrations. Whole body vibration transfers environmental vibration to human body through a large contact area. Vibration evaluation methods such as weighted root mean square (r.m.s.) acceleration method, fourth power VDV method are discussed. Along with that the paper will focus on various biodynamic response functions. Human models in the literature are divided into three main groups: lumped parameter (LP), finite element model (FE), and multibody model (MB). In the LP model, human body is represented by several concentrated masses which are connected by springs and dampers. The FE model considers that human body consists of numerous finite elements. And in MB model, human body is made of several rigid bodies connected by bushing element for both translational and rotational motion. So this paper thoroughly summarizes various models developed to reduce human body vibration. At the end, four different approaches of assessing ride comfort are summarized. These four approaches are ride measurement in vehicles, ride simulator test, shaker table test and subjective ride measurement.