Experimental validation of the computer aided design technique for seat comfort design and evaluation

Traditionally, seat comfort analyses are performed on physically produced seats and, in most cases, human subjects are asked to sit for a period of time to obtain personal subjective and objective comfort measurements. When performed in the seat comfort research laboratory at Tennessee State University, such procedures required close to 900 hours of testing to achieve feasible results. Besides, the costs of the procedures were noticeably high. One of the studies performed in the Lab employs computer driven techniques to avoid physical prototyping for seat comfort analyses. This technique is sought to eliminate the dependence on the traditional techniques and reduce resources consumptions. This study presents the crucial procedures needed to validate and authenticate the new technique by comparing its outcomes to those obtained by the traditionally established techniques. The validation process examines the CAD based system under diverse circumstances that accentuate the predominant factors of seat comfort. Such factors include sitter's anthropometry, seat dimensions, seat features, seat adjustability and cushion's material properties. The obtained results reflect high correlations between the outcomes of the CAD based system and the traditional methods. This study confirms that the proposed system is an adequate tool that may replace the tedious and expensive methods to perform seat comfort design and evaluations.