ACS Active Crashworhty Seating System

Considerable research and development effort has been devoted to improving seating in helicopters since the early 1960s when the need for improved ergonomics and crashworthiness was first established. Yet currently a typical rotorcraft crew/pilot seat uses only passive shock absorbers for mediocre crash safety and entirely lacks systems for whole body vibration reduction. Recent advances in the active and semi-active damping systems create opportunities to improve shock absorption capability while providing rotor induced whole body vibration mitigation. In this SBIR program Materials Technologies Corporation proposes a unified hybrid actuator/shock absorber concept that provides fail-safe adaptive shock absorption with active vibration control on typical helicopter crew seats for military personnel ranging from 5th% female to 90th% male.