Design and Test of a Tilting Seat for Improving Children’s Comfort Duringtraveling

Abstract

Tourism is directly related to passenger transport. For the improvement of quality of transport, thus-tourist services and quality of human life, the road vehicles are constantly developing. The moving speeds are rising and therefore-the accelerations acting on the passengers rise too. As a result-the comfort level drops. During cornering with high speeds lateral accelerations, which are a powerful irritant, causing discomfort, nausea and motion sickness called kinetosis, are generated. Systems for passenger cars tilting, which reduce lateral acceleration, are being used for a long time in railway transport. In automobiles such systems are harder to engineer and that is why they are still in experimental phase. A cheaper option is just tilting the seats in the automobiles. As children are the most vulnerable group of such kind of interference, the authors propose a special construction of a tilting child seat. The seat is designed, built and tested in real road conditions. Results from road and proving ground tests, showing a significant reduction of the lateral acceleration when using a tilting child seat, are shown in the paper.

Transmission of lateral vibrations to children during car traveling and possibilities for their reduction

“…One of them is conventional. The other one is specially designed for the needs of the research [8]. The design of the tilting seat is shown in Fig.…”

“…The hinge joint is located over the mass center of the child, sitting in the seat. This way while the automobile is cornering the centrifugal force acts in the child's mass center and makes the upper part of the seat with the sitting child tilt around the joint and towards the center of the turn, while the lower part of the seat goes outwards the center of the turn [8]. Fig.…”

“…3. Equipment, used in road trials: 1seat; 2rigid frame; 3 -inertial measurement unit (on tilting seat) or accelerometer (on conventional seat); 4data acquisition device; 5power supply; 6mobile computer [8,9].…”