The efficiency of a seat in reducing vibration depends on the characteristics of the vibration, the dynamic characteristics of the seat, and the dynamic characteristics of the person sitting on the seat. However, it is not known whether seat cushions influence the dynamic response of the human body, whether the human body influences the dynamic response of seat cushions, or the relative importance of human body nonlinearity and seat nonlinearity in causing nonlinearity in measures of seat transmissibility. This study was designed to investigate the nonlinearity of coupled seat and human body systems and compare the apparent mass of the human body supported on rigid and foam seats. A frequency domain model was used to identify the dynamic parameters of seat foams and investigate their dependence on subject sitting weight and hip breadth. With 15 subjects, the force and acceleration at the seat base and acceleration at the subject interface were measured during The measurements are presented in terms of the subject apparent mass on the rigid and foam seat surfaces, and the transmissibility and dynamic stiffness of each of the foam cushions.Both the human body and the foams showed nonlinear softening behaviour, which resulted in nonlinear cushion transmissibility. The apparent masses of subjects sitting on the rigid seat and on foam cushions were similar, but with an apparent increase in damping when sitting on the foams. The foam dynamic stiffness showed complex correlations with characteristics of the human body, which differed between foams. The nonlinearities in cushion transmissibilities, expressed in terms of changes in resonance frequencies and moduli, were more dependent on human body nonlinearity than on cushion nonlinearity.Keywords: seat transmissibility; nonlinearity; apparent mass; polyurethane foam; dynamic stiffness Published as: Nonlinearity in the vertical transmissibility of seating: The role of the human body apparent mass and seat dynamic stiffness

Numerical simulation using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become increasingly important as a tool to predict the potential occurrence of combustion instabilities in gas turbine combustors operating in lean premixed mode. Within the EU-funded Marie Curie project, LIMOUSINE (Limit cycles of thermo-acoustic oscillations in gas turbine combustors), a model test burner has been built in order to have reproducible experimental results for model validation. The burner consists of a Rijke tube of rectangular section having a flame-stabilizing wedge at about 1/4 of its length. Fuel and air supplies were carefully designed to give closed end acoustic inlet boundary conditions while the atmospheric outlet representing an acoustically open end. A transient CFD simulation of the turbulent, partially premixed, bluff body stabilized combusting flow has been carried out for the LIMOUSINE burner using ANSYS CFX commercial software. A 2-D section has been modelled by means of the scale resolving turbulence model, Scale-Adaptive Simulation (SAS), and a two-step Eddy Dissipation combustion model. Experiments were performed on the LIMOUSINE model burner to measure the dynamic variation of pressure and temperature. Results were obtained for several cases with power input ranging from 40 to 60 kW and air factors between 1.2 and 1.8. The CFD results are found to be in good agreement with experiments: the flame is predicted to stabilise on the bluff body in the fluid recirculation zone; resonance frequencies are found to change depending on power and air excess ratio and have a good agreement with experimental results and analytical values; pressure oscillations are consistent with pipe acoustic modes.