Car seat and occupant modelling using CAD

A current Brite-Euram project is concerned with life-cycle aspects of car seating with Loughborough being responsible for driver comfort assessment. This is being carried out through road and laboratory trials, with the results to be incorporated within the SAMMIE design system. Driver comfort is in part determined by seat pressure distributions which lead to deformation of the human flesh and the seat and movement of important design locations such as the driver's eyepoint. Accommodation of these effects requires a more realistic representation of the human body using surface rather than solid representations. Hence a shadow scanning technique is used to capture human body shape which is processed into the DUCT surface modelling system and via IGES files into SAMMIE. Finite element techniques are then used to predict deformations at the seat/driver interface.