Whatever makes you sit comfortable
Themes: Social Impact, Aerospace
A TRL is a measure to indicate the matureness of a developing technology. When an innovative idea is discovered it is often not directly suitable for application. Usually such novel idea is subjected to further experimentation, testing and prototyping before it can be implemented. The image below shows how to read TRL’s to categorise the innovative ideas.
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Summary of the project
What is comfortable for the one does not have to be comfortable for the other. Nevertheless companies who carry people want them to have a most comfortable journey as possible. Especially when it concerns long journeys the comfort of how you can sit, your chair, is very important. But what makes you feel comfortable in your seat? Besides what is comfortable is subjective so how can this be measured in an objects manner?
In this project the researcher looks at the comfortability of seats in an aircraft. The challenge here is to give the passengers a comfortable ride while there are limitations to the floorplan of the aircraft and hence the amount of seats that you can fit in. The researcher experimented with the width and pitch (amount of room for your legs) of the seats in an aircraft and measured the level of comfort using both subjective and objective methods.
The researcher found that the width of the seat contributed more to the comfort of passengers than the pitch.
What's next?
The next step is to combine the results from this study with other studies on measuring passenger comfort. The researcher wants to design an average optimum set of criteria for seat comfort in vehicles and to look into what can be added for comfort based on personal preferences.
Shabila Anjani Meng