Development of a nonlinear viscoelastic model for antivibration gloves

This study aims to develop a nonlinear viscoelastic model for the anti-vibration (AV) glove. The developed AV glove model will be coupled with a human hand-arm model to predict the vibration transmission from the hand-held tool to the hand-arm system with and without an AV glove. Five AV gloves were selected, namely, Air1, Air2, Gel1, Gel2, and Hybrid. An experiment was designed to measure the force-deflection and force-velocity characteristics of each AV glove at 20Hz and 30Hz. The experimental data were used to identify the parameters of the glove models as a target function. A nonlinear viscoelastic model of each AV glove was developed based on the Bouc-Wen model. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was used to determine the parameters of each AV glove model. The results show that R² values are over 0.9, signifying a strong fit of the developed model to experimental data. This study demonstrates that the proposed model can effectively predict the performance of AV gloves, which can be used to couple with the hand-arm system and to further study the effectiveness of AV gloves on vibration isolation from tools to the human hand-arm under different work conditions.