Improving the isolation performance of seat suspension using negative stiffness cam-springs

To further improve the isolation performance of the seat’s suspension system of vehicles, this study proposes a new design of the negative stiffness using two cam-springs (NS-CS). To clarify the isolation performance of NS-CS, two different structures of the seat’s traditional suspension (TS) and negative stiffness using the horizontal springs (NS-HS) are also used to compare the isolation performance between TS, NS-HS, and NS-CS. The performance indicators are evaluated through the seat’s acceleration in the time region and the seat’s power spectral density acceleration in the frequency region. The study shows that both these indices with NS-CS are lower than those of TS and NS-HS. Thus, the proposed NS-CS model improves driver’s comfort more than NS-HS.