Comfort driven design of style-constrained seat

The seat is one of the most important components of the car and performs multiple, often conflicting, functions; furthermore, it is the component with which the user mostly interacts while driving or being passenger. Therefore, the seat must provide the proper static support and lateral and longitudinal restraint during handling manoeuvres without compromising user comfort, regardless of percentile. The aim of the paper is to define a methodology that is able, by receiving as input the contact pressure distribution maps at the human-seat interface and the design constraints, to drive the generation of Class A surfaces that guarantee, not only a very appreciable aesthetic quality, but also, and above all, the higher right comfort to the user. The idea behind this work is based on the change of design paradigm that reverses the generative process, no longer based on the dictates of style, which constrains all following design-steps; in this work we propose to define a design flow that is guided by perceived comfort, appropriately evaluated on the basis of detected or simulated pressure profiles, and that, on the basis of the first findings can drive the stylists in the respect of the aesthetic/design tradition of the company. In summary, a design process is proposed that starts from the experimental pressure maps of an existing seat, analyses and verifies the most problematic areas, and consequently modifies the contact surface by generating a new geometry. In this recursive loop, the designer proposes new style sketches that will previously be verified by virtual models through pointwise modifications of the previously correlated FEM model. This new design approach was tested in a real Seat-development design process for evaluating comfort performance gaining towards style diktats.