The Design of a Seat Controller for the Half Car Model in Various Vibrating Conditions Using the Seated Human Body Situation

A drivers’ body is continuously under various vibrations, resulting in different physical disorders such as muscle-skeletal defects, neurogenic diseases, cardiovascular problems, gastrointestinal disorders, etc. In this paper, firstly the nonlinear dynamic equations of a seated human body in the half car model are investigated analytically and linearized by means of the Taylor series. Then the obtained equations are analyzed numerically by the state-space method and employed for the design of multivariable controllers using the canonical and similar transformations. Finally, the controller performance of the system is optimized to suppress the transferred vibrations to the human body using the Genetic Algorithm (GA). The results show the RMS of human body acceleration in both the horizontal and vertical directions, to be 2.76m/s2 and 0.27m/s2, with and without the controller, respectively. It decreases to 0.06m/s2 with an optimized controller; which indicates that the controller acts satisfactorily and efficiently mitigates the human body vibrations.