Weight reduction on the commercial vehicle driver seat with structural optimization

Driver seats in commercial vehicles are expected to provide high comfort to the driver due to long distances. This comfort is most commonly achieved through a pneumatic mechanism - pneumatic actuation. Besides, air entrances provide comfort, suspension motion provides alignment to road, on the other hand, high user friendliness, such as a large amount of the options on the seat, makes it valuable equipment. However, this seat, which directly surrounds the driver, affects the working conditions of the driver and has an importance on the driver's own life, has to provide the driver safety in the best way. For this reason, all required specification tests must be passed due to legal requirement and quality tests must be passed in terms of product reliability. A variety of strengthening exercises are made on the seat with the aim of passing all these tests, and the seat weight is considerably increased when this is taken into consideration. The weight is a broad title with particular attention in the transport sector, which directly influences productivity and therefore has a significant impact on costs. Various works are done in order to reduce the weight, different materials usage, optimization, more lightness are aimed in the studies. Due to the intense usage in land transportation, the lightness issue gains much more importance. For this reason, even the smallest amounts of lightness provided by commercial vehicles, irrespective of their own or overall weight, add a high amount of value to the work being done. In this thesis, weight reduction or structural strengthening at the same weight level are aimed, where the transport sectors are heavily interested. In the realization of these processes, optimization issues that are of high importance and become faster by consolidating from traditional methods are discussed. When optimization work was performed, the OptiStruct interface of the Altair / HyperWorks program was utilized and predominantly topography optimization issues were addressed. Different types of materials with a lower density, a different material qualities, or a reduced thicknesses are preferred during the operation. The inputs of the work done with the OptiStruct interface are provided by modeling the load on the workpiece during the ECE R14 safety belt pull test. The outputs of these studies are the inputs of the ECE R14 safety belt pull test. The ECE R14 seat belt pulling test's finite element analysis, which was carried out before and after the optimization studies, compared the benefits of the work carried out. After all these studies, it is planned to capture the desired lightness and the target strength level. As a result of the study, the outputs obtained by paying attention to the points such as optimization, weight reduction, strengthening, product performance, production cost, material cost are modeled again with better quality in the computer aided design program CATIA. Then exported to ECE R14 seat belt pulling test's finite elements analysis, which is one of the important tests for driver's seat. The appropriateness of the outcomes will be assessed at the end of the study.