Ergonomics

[ANDONI]

Hi everybody....

I was just wondering if anybody out there knows what the best angle is (driving position), between the forearm and the upperarm is?

Maybe it is theory, or maybe just because you found out what your drivers prefer....

Thank you very much...

Andoni Mazeika
www.formulasaeusb.com (http://www.formulasaeusb.com)

[woollymoof]

couldn't tell you, but there's a book around called "Fitting the task to the human" by a fellow "Grandjean", think that's how you spell it. It's got that sort of info in it, we used it for a class, it's very good.

[Michael Jones]

The US military has done work in this as well, with a few books on general human measurements, many of which pertain to motion ranges given particular power input requirements. I can't remember offhand the name of the book I read on this...it was pretty generic data but useful.

More useful without going into extensive ergonomics testing would be to listen to driver feedback from iterative designs of the driver bay. We mock up the whole bay early and play with seat, steering, pedal and shifter locations until it feels right for most and don't heinously conflict with the freakishly large or small folk.

Mocking this problem up would probably not be too difficult - moving the wheel such that it requires a 90, 105, 120, 135, 150 degree angle in the inside of the elbow and seeing what people think...measuring reaction times and power inputs if you're really ambitious.

There are obvious wrong answers....we had one girl who was so short, she had to scrunch up to the wheel to reach the pedals - the bicep/forearm angle there was about 45 degrees, which was painful and unsafe. And just thinking about straight-arm driving is making my elbow hurt.

---
Cornell Racing
http://fsae.mae.cornell.edu