Nonlinear biodynamics of passengers coupled with quarter car models

Biodynamic response of lumped parameter passenger-seat models coupled with simplified models of ground vehicles is investigated. The relatively small dimension of the resulting mechanical models is counterweighted by the complexity introduced by the strongly nonlinear characteristics exhibited by the components of both the biodynamic and the car subsystems. This complexity is enhanced further by the possibility of loss of contact allowed to take place between the wheel and the ground or the passenger and the seat, during strong excitation. After setting up the equations of motion, appropriate methodologies are developed, capturing the dynamic response of the coupled system to transient, harmonic and stochastic excitation, caused by road irregularities. Then, numerical results are presented, illustrating the effect of the excitation amplitude and frequency content on several response quantities related to the dynamic performance of the human and the vehicle components. Special emphasis is put on examining the influence of the seat suspension stiffness and damping characteristics. The results indicate that the nonlinear properties of the coupled model affect significantly its dynamics and can lead to large quantitative and qualitative deviations from the predictions of the corresponding linearized models. Among other things, complex motions are captured, even for harmonic excitation, when the forcing frequency lies between neighboring natural frequencies of the linearized system.