POWER SPECTRUM DENSITY (PSD) ANALYSIS OF AUTOMOTIVE PEDAL-PAD

Abstract

Vibration at the pedal-pad may contribute to discomfort of foot plantar fascia during driving. This is due to transmission of vibration to the mount, chassis, pedal, and then to the foot plantar fascia. This experimental study is conducted to determine the estimation of peak value using the power spectral density of the vertical vibration input at the foot. The power spectral density value is calculated based on the frequency range between 13 Hz to 18 Hz. This experiment was conducted using 12 subjects testing on three size of pedal-pads; small, medium and large. The result shows that peak value occurs at resonance frequency of 15 Hz. The PSD values at that resonance frequency are 0.251 (m/s2) 2/Hz for small pedal-pad, followed by the medium pedal-pad is at 0.387 (m/s2) 2/Hz and lastly for the large pedal-pad is at 0.483 (m/s2)2/Hz. The resultsindicate that during driving, the foot vibration when interact with the large pedal-pad contributed higher stimulus compared with the small and medium pedal-pad. The pedal-pad size plays an important role in the pedal element designs in terms of vibration-transfer from pedal-pads on the feet, particularly to provide comfort to the driver while driving.

Keywords

• Foot-transmitted Vibration
• Pedal-pad
• Power Spectral Density