Comfort has become an essential design element for aircraft manufacturers and an increasing demand for passengers, and the studies of the influence of vibration on comfort are relatively few. This study investigates the discomfort caused by whole-body vibration at various cabins of a large passenger aircraft during the cruise flight condition. We use 24 vibration stimuli with a duration of 10s generated from records of vibration signals in the Z-axis direction of the ground at four positions, i.e., the co-pilot, front, middle and rear seat positions in the aircraft cabin, including the original signals and the stimuli of magnitudes ranging from 0.5 to 2m/s² r.m.s. with 3-dB step r.m.s. W_k weighted accelerations. Twenty-four subjects (12 males and 12 females) experience the vibration stimuli in random order and give subjective magnitudes on the discomfort caused by vibration stimuli by a category-scale rating method. The discomfort caused by vibration at the middle and rear seat positions is significantly greater than that at the co-pilot and the front seat positions. Results also imply that the current international standards, e.g. BS 6841 and ISO 2631-1, have underestimated the discomfort caused by whole-body vibration at frequencies higher than 30Hz, which may cause relatively great discomfort.

Comfort; Subjective discomfort; Whole-body vibration; Aircraft cabin; Vibration standards