A Development of the Self Shape Adjustment Cushion Mechanism for Improving Sitting Comfort

The seat comfort of automobiles is one of the significant factors for determining the driver’s fatigue, emotional experience, and individual space (which captures their individuality, rather than just a means of transportation in modern society). Conventional automobile seats could not provide seating comfort suitable for all drivers, in the form of seats that fit each driver’s body type and the difficulty of meeting individual needs. This study proposes self-shape adjustable (the SSA seats) seats that improve the sitting comfort, safety, and secure the stability, by adjusting shape fit to the driver’s body type. The SSA seats transforms the seat itself, in a way that improves the distribution of contact pressure and reduces sitting fatigue, with the pneumatic system. The transformed seats provide better sitting comfort and safety than the conventional automobile seat, by providing a seat shape suitable for the body shape of all users. It was verified that the SSA seats, proposed in this paper, have a uniform and improved pressure distribution, compared to the conventional seat, in various sitting postures; the contact area between the seat and user is enlarged, and the pressure concentrated on the ischial bone is lowered. In addition, it was proven (through user evaluation) that quantitative evaluation verification was the same as qualitative evaluation results.

Shape and force control of cable structures with minimal actuators and actuation

Shape adjustment and stress control can be considered as one of the effective parameters in prestressed cable structures since such structures are widely constructed nowadays due to their characteristics. The assembly errors and applied loads hugely affect the cables’ nodal positions and stress due to their delicacy. The former could disturb the shape, which affects the appearance and the function of the structure. In contrast, the latter may increase the stress in some cables above the upper limit or induce slack in some others. Accordingly, a technique has been proposed that combined fmincon optimization that relies on four different algorithms with a controlling approach based on the force method. The presented method aims to minimize the total amount of actuation and miniaturize the number of actuators. The targets of previously confirmed techniques can be obtained with less actuation and fewer actuators by using the current technique. Based on the verified examples, the advantage of the current approach over the quoted methods is up to 55% and 37% in terms of the number of actuators and the total amount of actuation, respectively.

Generalized Developable Cubic Trigonometric Bézier Surfaces

This paper introduces a new approach for the fabrication of generalized developable cubic trigonometric Bézier (GDCT-Bézier) surfaces with shape parameters to address the fundamental issue of local surface shape adjustment. The GDCT-Bézier surfaces are made by means of GDCT-Bézier-basis-function-based control planes and alter their shape by modifying the shape parameter value. The GDCT-Bézier surfaces are designed by maintaining the classic Bézier surface characteristics when the shape parameters take on different values. In addition, the terms are defined for creating a geodesic interpolating surface for the GDCT-Bézier surface. The conditions appropriate and suitable for G1, Farin–Boehm G2, and G2 Beta continuity in two adjacent GDCT-Bézier surfaces are also created. Finally, a few important aspects of the newly formed surfaces and the influence of the shape parameters are discussed. The modeling example shows that the proposed approach succeeds and can also significantly improve the capability of solving problems in design engineering.