Predict Passenger Comfort In Aircraft Cabin To Improve Seat Design

If numerical simulation has long been used for seat design in the field of safety, the use of complete virtual seat prototyping during the seat development process is quite recent in the aircraft industry and seat comfort assessment is currently still performed mainly with volunteers seating in real seat prototypes and giving their subjective feeling. This way of working presents several disadvantages, such as repeatability issues, or tests happening late in the development process at a time where there is very few flexibility to improve the seat design or propose fully innovative solutions.

The aim of this paper is to show how it is possible with virtual seat prototyping to overcome the limitations of experimental studies with volunteers, to improve the understanding of the seating process, and to predict passenger comfort, even before any prototype is built.

AEGATS 2016, 12-14 April 2016 – Paris, France