Vehicle seat comfort and design: With special attention for aircraft seats

Research output: Book/ReportBookScientific

Abstract

After many years of working on vehicle seats for companies including BMW, Boeing, SNCF (French railways), Long Island Railroad, KLM and Zodiac Aerospace, I was asked by students and those in the industry if I could provide them with an overview of my work. At that time, however, such a thing did not exist. In recent years, I have answered many specific questions about vehicle seats from industry engineers and designers. I saved these answers in files, which allowed me to answer similar questions more quickly in the future. Students often asked me for background information on vehicle seat comfort, which I had to look up before responding. This work was also filed away for future reference. In recent years, my PhD students have also undertaken some very interesting work on vehicle seating, and in 2015 I edited a special issue of the scientific journal Work on Environmental Design, which will be published in 2016. This special issue included such interesting material as the description of the contour of the back while seated, and a study of a contour-based business class seating. All of this research is difficult for both students and industry employees to locate. I hence decided to put the filed information and the new work into a book – the preface for which you are reading. While planning this book, students and industry members advised me to illustrate it with a rich variety of pictures, and I took their advice. As such, this book is not so much for reading as for locating data and background information relating to seat design. Much of the information relates to recent studies in this fast-developing field; for instance, new 3D scanning techniques for scanning the body in motion, and new knowledge about sensor functions and the brain. While it is true that new insights could appear, making parts of this book redundant, basic anthropometric values such as trunk height and hip-knee length have not differed much over the last 30 years (two anthropometric studies of students from TU-Delft in 1985 and 2014 produced very similar data). It is thus reasonable to assume that the knowledge contained in these pages will remain valid for 10 years or more. As stated above, this is not intended as a ‘reading book’. The beginning section hence functions as a guide for using the book to find the relevant information.

Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationZwaag
PublisherPumbo
Number of pages97
ISBN (Print)978-94-6186-688-2
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • Comfort
  • Design
  • vehicle seat
  • vehicle seat comfort
  • seat design
  • seating
  • Comfort evaluation
  • ergonomics

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