Development of a Datadriven Model for Prediction of Vibrational Discomfort in Helicopters

Ensuring passenger comfort is an essential task of manned aviation. To describe the discomfort as a result of the entire vibration environment of a helicopter, an evaluation procedure is required. Currently, the most comprehensive approach to evaluate discomfort caused by whole-body vibration is described in ISO2631-1. Since ISO2631-1 is based on uniaxial and sinusoidal laboratory experiments, the discomfort evaluation of complex helicopter vibrations is not correctly reflected. This paper describes the systematic creation of an evaluation procedure for discomfort caused by whole-body vibration. Based on a study in a realistic helicopter environment, a data-driven evaluation procedure is derived that can also be applied to other experimental campaigns. Two possibilities for the structure of the evaluation procedure are presented. One is derived by optimizing the metric to the measured data. Therefore, a larger computation time is required. With the other structure, the calculation time is reduced by some simplifications. The calculation procedure is similar to that of ISO2631-1. The procedure determined in this way can be used, among other things, for future flight controller design. The newly developed model provides more accurate predictions of discomfort than the previous standard for helicopter applications.