Development of a Multi-Body Model to Predict the Settling Point of a Seat-Occupant System

Author(s):  
Yousof Azizi ◽  
Anil K. Bajaj ◽  
Patricia Davies

The location of the hip-joint (H-Point) of a seat occupant is an important design specification which directly affects the seat comfort. Most car seats are made of polyurethane foam so the location of the H-Point is dependent on the quasi-static behavior of foam. In this study a multi-body seat-occupant model is developed which incorporates a realistic polyurethane foam model. The seat-occupant model consists of two main components: the seat model and the occupant model. In this study the seat is represented by a series of discrete nonlinear viscoelastic elements. The nonlinear elastic behavior of these elements is expressed by a higher order polynomial while their viscoelastic behavior is described by a global hereditary type model with the parameters which are functions of the compression rate. The nonlinear elastic and viscoelastic model parameters were estimated previously using the data obtained from conducting a series of quasi-static compression tests on a car seat foam sample. The occupant behavior is described by a two-dimensional multi-body model with 5 degrees of freedom. A Lagrangian formulation is used to derive the governing equations for the seat occupant model. These differential equations are solved numerically to obtain the H-Point location. These results are then used to calculate the force distribution at the seat and the occupant interfaces. The effects of different system parameters on the system response and the interfacial pressure distribution are also studied.

Author(s):  
Yousof Azizi ◽  
Tarun Puri ◽  
Anil K. Bajaj ◽  
Patricia Davies

The location of the hip-joint (H-Point) of a seat occupant is an important design specification which directly affects the seat static comfort. Most car seats are made of polyurethane foam and so the location of the H-Point is dependent on the quasi-static behavior of foam. In this research, a previously developed model of the seat–occupant system is refined by incorporating an improved foam model which is used to study seat and occupant interactions and the location of occupant’s H-Point. The seat is represented by a series of discrete nonlinear viscoelastic elements that characterize the seating foam behavior. The nonlinear elastic behavior of these elements is expressed by a higher order polynomial while their viscoelastic behavior is described by a hereditary type model with parameters that are functions of the compression rate. The nonlinear elastic and viscoelastic model parameters were estimated previously using data obtained from a series of quasi-static compression tests on a car seat foam sample. The occupant behavior is described by a constrained two-dimensional multibody model with five degrees of freedom. A Lagrangian formulation is used to derive the governing equations for the seat–occupant model. These differential equations are solved numerically to obtain the H-Point location. These results are then used to calculate the force distribution at the seat and occupant interfaces. The force distribution at the seat–occupant interface is also investigated experimentally and is found to match qualitatively with the results obtained using the seat–occupant model.


Author(s):  
Rong Deng ◽  
Patricia Davies ◽  
Anil K. Bajaj

A fractional derivative model of dissipative effects is combined with a nonlinear elastic model to model the response of polyurethane foam in quasi-static compression tests. A system identification method is developed based on a separation of the elastic and viscoelastic parts of the response, which is possible because of symmetries in the imposed deformation timehistory. Simulations are used to evaluate the proposed identification method when noise is present in the response. The system identification technique is also applied with some success to experimental data taken from several compression experiments on two types of polyurethane foam blocks.


Materials ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Xu ◽  
Shiqiao Gao ◽  
Zhuocheng Ou ◽  
Haifu Ye

Quasi-static and dynamic compression experiments were performed to study the influence of liquid nitrile rubber (LNBR) on the mechanical properties of epoxy resin. The quasi-static experiments were conducted by an electronic universal machine under strain rates of 0.0001/s and 0.001/s, while a Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB) system was adopted to perform the dynamic tests for strain rates up to 5600/s. The standard Zhu-Wang-Tang (ZWT) nonlinear viscoelastic model was chosen to predict the elastic behavior of LNBR/epoxy composites under a wide range of strain rates. After some necessary derivation and data fitting, a set of model parameters for the tested materials were finally obtained. Meanwhile, the incremented form of the ZWT nonlinear viscoelastic model were deduced and implemented into the user material program of LS-DYNA. A simulation-test contrast had been performed to verify the validity and feasibility of the algorithm. The results showed that the viscoelastic behavior of epoxy resin can be effectively simulated.


Author(s):  
Yousof Azizi ◽  
Patricia Davies ◽  
Anil K. Bajaj

Flexible polyethylene foam is used in many engineering applications. It exhibits nonlinear and viscoelastic behavior which makes it difficult to model. To date, several models have been developed to characterize the complex behavior of foams. These attempts include the computationally intensive microstructural models to continuum models that capture the macroscale behavior of the foam materials. In this research, a nonlinear viscoelastic model, which is an extension to previously developed models, is proposed and its ability to capture foam response in uniaxial compression is investigated. It is hypothesized that total stress can be decomposed into the sum of a nonlinear elastic component, modeled by a higher-order polynomial, and a nonlinear hereditary type viscoelastic component. System identification procedures were developed to estimate the model parameters using uniaxial cyclic compression data from experiments conducted at six different rates. The estimated model parameters for individual tests were used to develop a model with parameters that are a function of strain rates. The parameter estimation technique was modified to also develop a comprehensive model which captures the uniaxial behavior of all six tests. The performance of this model was compared to that of other nonlinear viscoelastic models.


1990 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. F. Duffy ◽  
J. M. Manderscheid

A macroscopic noninteractive reliability model for ceramic matrix composites is presented. The model is multiaxial and applicable to composites that can be characterized as orthotropic. Tensorial invariant theory is used to create an integrity basis with invariants that correspond to physical mechanisms related to fracture. This integrity basis is then used to construct a failure function per unit volume (or area) of material. It is assumed that the overall strength of the composite is governed by weakest link theory. This leads to a Weibull-type model similar in nature to the principle of independent action (PIA) model for isotropic monolithic ceramics. An experimental program to obtain model parameters is briefly discussed. In addition, qualitative features of the model are illustrated by presenting reliability surfaces for various model parameters.


2011 ◽  
Vol 71-78 ◽  
pp. 937-944
Author(s):  
Ping Jie Cheng ◽  
Han Zhou Hu ◽  
Shu Guang Hu

The durability of concrete structure has become an important field of civil engineering at home and abroad, and how to determine the environmental effects of typical durability of concrete structure key parameters become the key. Proposed by different domestic and foreign scholars to study durability parameters of concrete structure of different models, different models are different in the source, type, model parameters and applicable conditions. In this paper, some typical models are reviewed and analyzed from two major aspects of the durability of concrete, the deterioration of concrete and the steel corrosion.


2011 ◽  
Vol 311-313 ◽  
pp. 301-308
Author(s):  
Shou Hong Han ◽  
Zhen Hua Lu ◽  
Yong Jin Liu

In order to investigate the multi-axial mechanical properties of a kind of PU (polyurethane) foam, some experiments in different loading conditions including uni-axial tension, uni-axial compression, hydrostatic compression and three-point bending were conducted. It is shown that the hydrostatic component influences yield behavior of PU foam, the yield strength and degree of strain hardening in hydrostatic compression exceed those for uni-axial compression. In terms of the differential hardening constitutive model, the evolution of PU foam yield surface and plastic hardening laws were fitted from experimental data. A finite element method was applied to analyze the quasi-static responses of the PU foam sandwich beam subjected to three-point bending, and good agreement was observed between experimental load-displacement responses and computational predictions, which validated the multi-axial loading methods and stress-strain constitutive model parameters. Moreover, effects of two foam models applied to uni-axial loading and multi-axial loading conditions were analyzed and compared with three-point bending tests and simulations. It is found that the multi-axial constitutive model can bring more accurate prediction whose parameters are obtained from the tests above mentioned.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Bauer ◽  
Ivanna Kramer

The knowledge about the impact of structure-specific parameters on the biomechanical behavior of a computer model has an essential meaning for the realistic modeling and system improving. Especially the biomechanical parameters of the intervertebral discs, the ligamentous structures and the facet joints are seen in the literature as significant components of a spine model, which define the quality of the model. Therefore, it is important to understand how the variations of input parameters for these components affect the entire model and its individual structures. Sensitivity analysis can be used to gain the required knowledge about the correlation of the input and output variables in a complex spinal model. The present study analyses the influence of the biomechanical parameters of the intervertebral disc using different sensitivity analysis methods to optimize the spine model parameters. The analysis is performed with a multi-body simulation model of the cervical functional spinal unit C6-C7.


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