STUDY OF HUMAN COMFORT IN READING WHILE TRAVELLING IN VEHICLES UNDER LOW FREQUENCY VIBRATION

Abstract

Many passengers utilize their time during train journey to carry out various sedentary activities like reading, writing, drinking etc. out of which reading activity is most commonly performed activity preferred by the passengers. There are, however, several important factors inside the train environments that hamper the performance of such activities. The vibration is one of the most important factor that influences the performance of sedentary activities during the travel. Moreover, passengers during travel adopt different postures to attenuate the vibration in order to perform their activities satisfactorily. The available standards (ISO 2631-4, ENV 12299) do not include the effects of vibrations on passenger activities. Therefore, in order to provide a suitable environment for satisfactory performance of reading activity under vibratory conditions, a laboratory based experiment was conducted to simulate train environment in which text from an English daily newspaper was read by 6 healthy male seated test subjects with age group between 23 to 27 yrs, during exposure to vibration in Fore-and-Aft direction. With a narrow-band sinusoidal vibration at low frequencies between 2 Hz to 10 Hz, vibration magnitudes of 0.6 ms-2 r.m.s. and 1.2 ms-2 r.m.s and under two seated postures, reading speed expressed as CWPM (% static speed) was measured and subject ratings for perceived difficulty while reading were obtained from the test subjects. A thorough analysis of experimental results obtained was done using a statistical software package, Design-Ease version 7.1.2 (Stat-Ease, Inc, Minneapolis). The results of the statistical analyses in terms of probability value i.e. p-value; F-value and R2 data value were then reported..