Development of a multiaxis active seat mount to mitigate helicopter aircrew whole-body vibration exposure

Abstract

This article presents the development and evaluation of a proof-of-concept multiaxis and actively controlled helicopter seat mount for aircrew whole-body vibration reduction. The multiaxis seat mount is designed to be installed between the helicopter seat floor and the seat supporting structure to minimize the impact on crashworthiness requirements of the helicopter seat. The design involves multiple miniature force actuators to counteract the vibrations of the seat frame and occupant transmitted from the helicopter floor in three orthogonal directions. The actuators are controlled by an adaptive feedforward filtered-x least mean square algorithm to cancel the helicopter floor vibration input. The prototype active seat mount design was tested in various configurations with a shaker table providing representative Bell-412 helicopter vibration inputs. Test results demonstrated that the vibrations of the seat frame and mannequin occupant body were suppressed simultaneously, and the major N/rev harmonic peaks of the occupant’s whole-body vibration were reduced by more than 20 dB. This demonstrated that the multiaxis active seat mount design can mitigate the whole-body vibration exposure of the helicopter aircrew to improve their ride quality and reduce adverse health effect.