Road Roughness and Whole Body Vibration: Evaluation Tools and Comfort Limits
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 9
Abstract
An important element of achieving quality in a road network is the control of vehicle vibration due to pavement roughness and road irregularities. Scientific literature and international standards suggest that we evaluate these phenomena by measuring the whole body vibration (WBV) on the road user, but, for the practical aims of road engineering, this expression has to be related to road unevenness indexes, especially the most common one (the international roughness index, IRI). This index, in turn, is obtained from measured pavement geometric data using a conventional model of a mechanical system representing part of a vehicle. To better investigate the problem of user comfort, more complex models and analyses are needed. In this paper, a model of a real and common vehicle is presented and used, after a calibration process, to perform many dynamic simulations. The obtained results, in terms of weighted vertical acceleration ( , that is, the WBV index, according to ISO standard), show good correlations ( from 0.75 to 0.93, depending on vehicle speed) with the IRI values of the examined road sections. On the basis of this correlation, authors propose threshold values for both vibration and roughness indexes; these thresholds could be used for road users’ comfort evaluation and adopted in technical standards.
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank Dr. Eng. Marco Sbrolli, who performed on-field tests and provided data analyses for the calibration process of the full car vehicle model, and Dr. Eng. Riccardo Intonti for the cooperation in preliminary approach in modeling problem.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 9 • September 2010
Pages: 818 - 826
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: May 13, 2009
Accepted: Dec 29, 2009
Published online: Jan 8, 2010
Published in print: Sep 2010
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