Airline Seat Testing

Soars to New Heights

French manufacturer Sicma Aero Seat SA relies on virtual dynamic testing in the evaluation of its custom aircraft seats.
by Jeremy Cailleteau he next time you enter an airplane, check out the interior. The key component is the seating package. With a focus on attracting customers and competing in tight economic times, more airlines are promoting seat size, ergonomic design and valueadded features as part of their marketing strategy. Their seats must not only appeal to passengers but also adhere to various certication and safety regulations, including those related to crash impact. French aircraft seat manufacturer Sicma Aero Seat SA, a subsidiary of Zodiac SA, closely collaborates with airlines and aircraft manufacturers in the custom design of airplane, pilot, helicopter and cabin attendant seats. We develop products to our customers specications and use a combination of virtual and physical testing to meet appropriate regulations. In fact, we are increasing the amount of virtual testing we perform to improve our seating products, cut certication costs and reduce our product development and delivery cycles.

Concept To Reality Spring/Summer 2009

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16 g impact analysis simulating an emergency landing

Take a Seat
Sicma offers customers a standard set of seats as well as custom-designed seats. For example, when airlines order economy seats, they typically select a model from our catalog. We then make modications to the seat such as adjusting for comfort or reconguring the size of the TV screen on the backrest taking into account regulations that are independent of the airline class. Business and rst-class seats are designed from scratch and based on customers requirements and regulations imposed by various government agencies. Customer specications for such seats typically require more strength to ensure the comfort of passengers. Product development time for new seats is very short, about one year from concept to delivery. There are essentially three phases in our evaluation process. At Sicma Aero Seat, we develop an initial prototype for new seats to ensure that it meets customers specications. Then, we conduct virtual and physical tests. Finally, we address certication requirements on the pre-series seats. Depending on test results, simulations are performed to quickly evaluate design modications to achieve certication.

Safety First
Unless airline seats pass government regulations, they cannot be installed on the aircraft. Seats must be designed for the safety of passengers and their rescue. To address safety concerns, we conduct static and dynamic tests, some of which include passenger dummies. For example, to evaluate the strength of the seat legs and their connection to the oor, we perform virtual static tests, applying gravity load cases. Virtual body blocks, which are rigid body representations of a passenger sitting in the seat, are secured on the

basic seat frame, and static loads are applied in the up, down, fore and aft directions. The 3D results are then reviewed to ensure that the seat base frame remains intact to facilitate rescue efforts. One dynamic test that we perform relates to oor deformation in emergency landing conditions. Here, the structure of the seat needs to resist impact. In this scenario, we apply a sudden deceleration of 16 g to a seat and dummy, which are moving at a given velocity. To design for the worst-case scenario, we deliberately deform the oor before the application of the deceleration taking into account a preexisting damage situation. Failure is not allowed. The lumbar test is an important dynamic evaluation that measures seat sturdiness. Criteria include velocity, seat pitch angle, seat yaw angle, peak deceleration, time-to-peak and oor deformation. We apply a 60-degree angle load to the oor (representing the load in an emergency landing without wheels) as well as a deceleration equal to 14 g. To pass this test, the measured load in a passengers lumbar area cannot exceed 1,500 lbs. In addition, we conduct physical tests to minimize passenger head injuries. With one dummy placed in a seat, and another seat positioned in front of the rst, we apply a deceleration of 16 g. During deceleration, we want to check the head injuries for the dummy in the back seat. The seats are designed to avoid passenger impact with sharp or hard objects as well as to prevent seat deformations that can block evacuation.

Simulating Real-Word Performance

Eight years ago, all of our seat testing was physical. Initially, we started to use CAE software to simulate some static tests on seats, such as passenger push/ pull loads on backrests and armrests. Over time, we

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Innovation in Cabin Interiors

icma Aero Seat SA operates as a subsidiary of Zodiac SA, a French company that has been in business since 1909. Sicma is headquartered in France with operations in Germany, Brazil, Dubai, Hong Kong and the United States. The company is well-known for the manufacture of airline passenger seats, convertible passenger seats, passenger seats for low-cost companies, crew and pilot seats, and helicopter seats. It counts the worlds premier airlines as well as Airbus and Boeing among its customers. The company offers new generations of competitive,

16 g-compliant seats, which require cabinetequipment materials to be able to withstand a crash impact 16 times the force of gravity. This translates into tougher design, manufacturing and maintenance constraints. Seats range from the simplest model to the most sophisticated, incorporating complex electrical and electronic features, control and accessories. These include head and leg rests, video screens, electronic games, Internet access and telephone sets. Whats more, the company is focused on innovative designs and concepts such as the 180-degree seat, the bed-seat and the Sky Lounge. Sicma participates in the SAE Technical Committee, SAE Aircraft SEAT, which addresses all facets of aircraft seat design, maintenance and in-service experience. The group is responsible for aircraft seat systems design and performance standards development.

Business seat (left) and economy seat (right)

continued to increase and broaden our use of simulation. A little less than a year ago, we expanded into simulating dynamic events. Today, we primarily employ simulation to redesign the seats when the physical tests fall short of safety government regulations. The true value of simulation is that it has reduced the percentage of seats that initially fail. However, when a new seat does fail a test, simulation allows us to nd the best solution faster by providing us with a better understanding of the failure phenomena. In addition, we can avoid lengthy and costly prototyping and physical testing processes to evaluate design alternatives. Altair HyperWorks is the simulation platform that we predominantly use for our static and dynamic seat analyses. For example, we use Altair HyperMesh to support all of our nite element (FE) meshing activities and HyperView to visualize FE and multi-body systems results, video and engineering data. For our dynamic analyses, we use Altairs HyperCrash pre-processing technology to quickly execute our crash and safety modeling tasks. We also use Altairs RADIOSS solver for static and dynamic simulation and optimization. An advantage

of selecting RADIOSS is that it has tightly integrated and accurate dummy models to support our safety evaluations. Further, we were able to customize Altairs HII_FAA RADIOSS dummy by introducing some deformable entities and connections to aid in our testing and evaluation efforts. We believe that we have a distinct advantage over our competition by using HyperWorks. The quality of the CAE tools, the value-based software licensing model and Altairs technical customer support are key differentiators over other software providers. Sicma sees simulation as an important aspect of our business and for customers. We have an aggressive pass rate goal for new seat concepts of 90%. By continuing to leverage HyperWorks and RADIOSS to improve our pass rate, we will eliminate the need to perform multiple physical tests and rework. This, in turn, will reduce development costs and time for both Sicma and our customers.
Jeremy Cailleteau is the Senior FEA Stress Analyst at Sicma Aero Seat SA, France.

For more information about Sicma and RADIOSS, visit www.altair.com/c2r or check 01 or 02 on the reply card.

Concept To Reality Spring/Summer 2009

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