Numerical and Experimental Investigation of a Single-Axis Parallel Active Vibration Mount for Helicopter Seats Using Vibration Standards

This paper presents the experimental and numerical investigation of a single-axis replicate of a patented multi-axis active vibration isolation seat mount. Following the design of the multi-axis system, this single axis vibration isolation mount uses a flexible elastomer support placed in parallel with an electromagnetic actuator. This mount is designed to reduce the N/rev harmonic vibration of a helicopter using a filtered-X least mean square (FXLMS)-based controller. To improve the efficiency of the FXLMS controller for this application, the ISO-2631-1 Wk filter is added. Employing this modified controller, the experimental setup is tested using a payload mass representative of a 95th percentile pilot. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed design in canceling the unwanted helicopter vibration, where the active mount effectively reduces the vibration representative of a Bell-412 helicopter by 69.37% (−10.28 dB, g-rms). In order to develop a better understanding of the problem, the system is also modeled from first principles in simulink. The comparison between the nonlinear numerical model and the experimental results demonstrates a good agreement between the two approaches. Moreover, it is shown that the addition of the ISO-2631-1 Wk filter improves the transient performance of the FXLMS controller for the given helicopter vibration profile.