Predicting the discomfort caused by tractor vibration

A field study was conducted to investigate how the discomfort caused by the vibration of an agricultural tractor can be predicted from objective measurements of the vibration in the cabin. Eleven professional drivers judged the vibration discomfort produced by four different tractors on sixteen different test runs. At the same time, for all the tests, the multi-axis vibration in the cabin was measured on the floor, the seat pan and the seat backrest. For each of the 704 tests carried out, the discomfort caused by the vibration was predicted from the measured vibration in the cabin using a total of twenty different analysis procedures. The relative merits of the different prediction procedures were investigated by comparing, on an individual basis for each driver/tractor combination, the statistical significance of the correlations between the subjective judgements and the predicted values. There was considerable variability in the drivers' subjective responses, but it was concluded that, overall, the best procedure for predicting the vibration discomfort in an agricultural tractor is that recommended by ISO 2631 (International Organization for Standardization 1978), using the frequency weighted rms values of the vibration (0.5-20 Hz) measured on the seat pan in the three orthogonal directions, and taking the square-root-of-the-sum-of-the-squares of the values in order to combine the directions as recommended in Amendment 1 to ISO 2631 (International Organization for Standardization 1982).