Comfort evaluation for aircraft seat cushion based on finite element model

The comfort of pilot's seat is highly demanded and the sitting pressure is a very important index to evaluate the seat comfort. A human-seat cushion finite element model including the pelvis was built to simulate the pressure distribution in the human-seat cushion interface and interior the human body, and finally to evaluate the comfort of the plane's seat. The simulation and experiment results were compared to verify the validity of the model, after that simulation under different overload accelerations was performed. By an analysis of the pressure distribution and maximum pressure, the simulation and experiment results are highly consistent and the maximum pressure is linearly dependent with the overload acceleration. The results show that the human-seat cushion model is validated and can be used to evaluate the comfort of different seat cushions under different overload accelerations.