Assessment of passenger long-term vibration discomfort: a field study in high-speed train environments

Abstract

This study revealed the mechanism of long-term passenger vibration discomfort in high-speed trains and proposed a novel evaluation model to assess it, while the most popular international standard ISO 2631-1 is unsuitable. Here, a field test was conducted to investigate the long-term passenger vibration comfort in high-speed trains under different operation environments by the measurement of the whole-body vibration (WBV) and the subjective ratings of passenger comfort. During the whole sitting period of high-speed train passengers, the phenomena ‘compensatory degradation’ and ‘discomfort accumulation’ were found, which meant that the brief termination of vibration cannot fundamentally alleviate passenger vibration comfort. And the vibration comfort can be evaluated by the product of exposure time and the novel vibration acceleration index we proposed. Meanwhile, high-speed trains with higher velocities or running in tunnel environments have higher frequency-weighted WBV amplitude than open-air and lower velocities, which caused more vibration discomfort of passengers.

Practitioner Summary: This field study provided data support for ensuring the occupational health of train drivers whose work routes involve a large number of tunnels and improving passenger vibration comfort. Meanwhile, a novel idea was provided for evaluating the vibration comfort of passengers who prolonged exposure to low-amplitude environments.

Keywords:

• Long-term vibration discomfort
• WBV exposures
• operation environments
• high-speed train

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 52075553; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 51405517; and the Hu-Xiang Youth Talent Program under grant number 2018RS3002; and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan under grant number 2020JJ7030; and the School Enterprise Cooperation Program of Central South University under grant number 2021XQLH012.