A Case Study on the Discomfort Caused by Vertical Vibration in a Micro Commercial Car

Abstract: As an extraordinary popular type of car in China, the micro commercial vehicles are facing increasing demands of customers for improving the riding comfort. It is necessary to build a predicting model of comfort related to the vibration experienced by drivers and passengers in the micro commercial vehicles when they are running on the complex road surfaces in the developing areas of China. An experimental study was conducted to investigate the discomfort produced by vertical vibration of a micro commercial car when it is running in four types of road conditions (i.e., the asphalt, concrete, gravel and bump road). Based on the field measurements, six vibration stimuli ranging from 0.531 to 2.991 m/s2 r.m.s. (Wb weighted) were generated representing various running states at each road conditions, so there were totally 24 vibration stimuli for all the running conditions. Thirty subjects experienced the stimuli in random orders and gave their subjective evaluation of the discomfort in absolute magnitude estimation method. The predicting model of the discomfort of vibration was established for each road conditions.