Vibration quality and ride comfort investigation with transient excitation in a ground vehicle simulator environment

Ground vehicle ride comfort is closely associated with vibration quality as perceived by the human occupants of a vehicle. While outstanding vibration quality is a desirable outcome of the vehicle design process, it is challenging to relate customer perceptions of vibration quality to customer-facing vehicle responses measured inside of a vehicle. Previous work with steady-state vibration has shown that human perception of vibration can be compared to how humans perceive sound, where both the amplitude and frequency of the excitation will alter its perception. Thus, a simple measurement of vibration level is insufficient to predict comfort. In this work, an analysis of human perception of transient vibration is undertaken using a ground vehicle simulator. Physical measurements from inside four different production vehicles are presented including accelerometer, microphone, and action camera recordings. The test event performed is travel over a cleat, with varying vehicle speeds and tire inflation pressures. The physical measurements are used as inputs to the simulator. A comparison is made between the perceived vibration quality of the vehicles as reported by an expert human jury and the physically measured vehicle responses. A ranking of 36 cleat test events for vibratory harshness from best to worst is presented.