1

COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN VALIDATION OF THE

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT FOR SEAT
COMFORT PREDICTION

Saed Amer, Postdoctoral at Tennessee State University, USA (samer01@my.tnstate.edu)
Landon Onyebueke, Professor at Tennessee State University, USA (lonyebueke@tnstate.edu)

ABSTRACT
Seat discomfort is a major cause for occupant's health complications and is blamed for the diminished
quality of the seated activity. Although many studies were conducted in the area of seat comfort, it seems
that the ability of the seat to provide comfort is still deficient; this can be noted through the countless
products that claim to provide or improve seat comfort. Seat comfort evaluation is currently performed
through tedious procedures that consume resources using physical prototyping and human testing. This
study pertains to a technique that expedites seat comfort analyses by integrating three systems each can be
an adequate tool for seat comfort evaluation. The first system is used to retrieve information from the
customer via Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and examine the current seat design against the existing
products and market leverage. The second system is a Computer Aided Design (CAD) technique that
allows the designer to model and evaluate seat comfort in the early design stages. Finally, a prediction
model is used to integrate the two systems by fusing the subjective analyses obtained from the QFD with
the objective analyses from the CAD technique. This study aims to present a validation technique that
guarantees the subjective analysis in the QFD including the relationships between the customers needs
and the designers solutions. The proposed technique employs CAD to test the degree of relationship
depicted for the seat components comfort level as each seat parameter undergoes a controlled change. The
outcomes of the system are compared before and after the validation process to prove that the QFD
validation using CAD post the accuracy and increase the correlation when compared to traditional seat
comfort techniques.

KEYWORDS
Seat Comfort, Quality Function Deployment, QFD, Computer Aided Design, CAD, Computer Aided
Engineering, CAE, Finite Element Analysis, FEA.

INTRODUCTION
Seat comfort is defined as a system that provides adequate body posture and support without excess
physiological pressure points while maintaining overall occupant well-being [1]. Implied from the
definition, many factors are considered to increase the comfort privilege; some can be subjective i.e. driven
by the occupants psychological preferences and mood. Such factors are indefinite and may be impossible
to measure. The outmost factors are the objective ones which can be measured and controlled. Some of the
objective factors include physical factors that influence seat comfort such as Biomechanics and
Physiological factors [2], vibration evaluation [3], thermal and humidity factors [4]. The most considered
factor for comfort research is the investigations of contact pressure distribution between the human and the
seat. According to literature surveys and laboratory experimentations, the correlation between objective and
subjective data suggests that decreasing the contact pressure between the human and the seat brings about
more comfort [5]. Contact pressure measurement is usually obtained using pressure mapping systems such
as TekScan BPMS. An example of such implementation is the work performed by Ojetola et al. The study
employed the pressure mapping to evaluate the seat comfort for ejection seats with regards to three
different rail angles [6].

Seat comfort evaluations are traditionally performed on finished products and may require human testing.
The main shortcoming of such procedures is the resource consumption due to the need for finished
products; in which case, alterations are usually retrofitted into the seat and has to be mended in a new seat
production cycle [1]. According to Kolich et al., seat developing cycle may take up to three years as
illustrated in Figure 1 [7]. Another shortcoming is the dependence on human feedback which is costly and
indefinite due to the lack of consistency. Therefore, there is a need to improve seat comfort design by

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importance for each part parameter is calculated. The final output of the QFD includes the percentage of
importance of the products parameters and the parts parameters that constitute comfort. Consequently, the
final value for the comfort level is derived from combining the values of importance to produce a final
ranked from zero (0.0) to five (5.0) that represent the comfort level of the proposed seat.

COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN FOR SEAT COMFORT EVALUATION
CAD is defined as the exploitation of computer systems to expedite the creation, modification, analysis, or
optimization of a design [15]. It was noted in previous works and literature surveys that Computer Aided
Design\Engineering is an adequate tool for seat design and comfort analysis [16]. The advent of CAD
permits the evaluation of seat comfort in the early design stages circumventing physical prototyping which
is utterly pricey and tedious. The proposed CAD technique performs comfort evaluation by simulating
sitting postures on a new seat model and determines the physical factors that contribute to its comfort; CAE
is employed to analyze the physics that relate to seat comfort and evaluate the comfort level of projected
seat designs using different simulated seating scenarios. The Computer Aided Design system is launched
with an interaction channel that ties the QFD and the CAD systems. At this juncture, the output of the QFD
technique are the design parameters, known in QFD as the HOWs, which by far satisfy the needs of the
customers. These parameters and entities are then conveyed to the CAD technique as the blueprints for the
modeling new seat designs.


SEAT FEATURES
Laboratory experimentations and literature surveys agree that adding seat features provide more contact
area between the seat and the occupant which seems to promote comfort [8]; hence, it is important to
consider the effects of the seat features on the comfort evaluation process. In this study, seat features can be
retrofitted to the seat design or removed without losing the functions of the seat. Different seat features
were considered in this study and were created and enclosed in an easy to access CAD database. Some
features may require alteration of the basic seats parts such as lumbar support and cushion curvature, while
most can be added to the seat as separate parts such as the head rest, armrests, and the footrest. The seat
adjustment features are also considered in this technique for accommodating different individuals with
different anthropometries; such features include seat-pan height, rotation adjustments, back support angle
adjustment and more.

THE SIMULATION TECHNIQUE
For the purpose of this study, sitting posture is described as the manner that the human body is positioned
on the seat surface and the matter that the human body is supported to fit and feel in the seat [17]. Several
sitting postures were considered in this study aiming to understand the importance of seat features to
comfort. Figure 4 shows seven sitting postures used in laboratory experimentation and are simulated using
the CAD software. The first posture is considered the simplest where all the analyses are centered in the
cushion and the rest of the seat features are neglected. This posture describes the human sitting up on the
cushion, arms positioned on the thighs and head held up. Gradually, more seat features are added and more
of the body surface areas are in contact with the seat surface, hence, the load will be distributed on more
surface areas consequently, reducing the contact pressure.
FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS (FEA)
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) can be described as a technique that demonstrates the reaction of an object
in CAD due to excitations; this may include force loadings, contact pressure, thermal excitations, fluid
motions and more [18]. As established in the definition for seat comfort, the physical measurement of seat
comfort depends on the regions of high contact pressure between the occupant and the seat surface; these
regions are usually discovered using tools that identify the contact pressure points and map them with
respect to the sitting posture.

One of the conventional tools used to detect contact pressure is the Pressure Mapping Systems. In the CAD
technique, however, contact pressure regions are detected using (FEA). Research shows that FEA is a valid
technique which is highly considered in the industry [16], yet many calibrations and validation testing were
performed before endorsing it. The more high pressure regions discovered, the less the comfort level of the

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comes are inve
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alidation of the
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are presented i
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tional Methods
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Figure 7. T
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system to explo
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amining the co
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xamine the dis
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SCUSSIONS
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