Seat Testing
At a glance
Millbrook tests the safety, performance, refinement and durability of vehicle, railway and aircraft seats.
It can simulate anything from an occupants’ ingress and egress movements over a 10 year period to a vehicle crash, delivering accurate, repeatable results against national and international regulation standards, consumer safety protocols and customers’ own specifications. It offers support at each stage of a seat’s lifecycle.
Millbrook helps manufacturers to produce the right seats for their specific applications, increase safety and comfort and reduce warranty returns.
Seat Mechanical Durability Testing
Millbrook uses its automated robots, pneumatic test rigs, hydraulic shakers and climatic chambers to test passenger car, commercial vehicle, railway and aircraft seats for material wear and structural durability.
Whether a requirement is for automated durability testing or for live ingress/egress tests with human testers, Millbrook has experienced project managers, test engineers and multipurpose robots to ensure accurate, repeatable results.
Mechanical Durability Seat Testing at a Glance
- Testing up to 25 seats simultaneously, using various pneumatic test rigs, and single or multi-axis vibration rigs
- Fully automated test robots
- Ingress, egress, jounce and squirm seat durability tests
- Seat cover durability tests
- Testing the structures of a seat and its suspension capabilities
- Fatigue and fracture testing
- Environmental impact and solar loading seat tests using climatic chambers
- Vibration testing of components to ensure that they won’t fail under normal road conditions
- Key life testing
Electric and Electro-mechanical Durability Testing
Millbrook offers a range of shakers, actuators and environmental chambers for testing electronic elements of a seat, including wiring harnesses and heating systems.
- Automated testing of seat heating systems
- Wiring harness and cable loom testing using shakers, actuators and climatic chambers
Seat Safety Testing
Crash and Sled Tests for Seats
Millbrook performs dynamic seat safety tests using its state-of-the-art ServoSled and full-vehicle crash test facilities.
Using the ServoSled, Millbrook tailors acceleration pulses to simulate real-world collision scenarios and to record rapid, high-precision results. Customers can specify their own pulses or those required by regulations and consumer safety protocols, such as EuroNCAP. Millbrook also tests seats in vehicles as part of the system by conducting full-scale crash tests.
- Passenger, commercial, rail, aircraft, healthcare and motorsport vehicle applications
- Frontal, rear, side and offset seat impact simulations
- Full scale crash tests including roll-over
- Seat strength tests to ECE R17
- Homologation tests for competition seats according to FIA standard 8855-1999
- Aircraft seat testing to the requirements of EASA CS 23.562, CS 25.562, CS 27.562 and CS 29.562
Seat Refinement Testing
Seat Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) Analysis
Millbrook uses its vertical pitch and roll and other vibration test facilities to identify buzz, squeak and rattle issues in seats.
This can be done pre- and post-durability testing to identify any changes over a seat’s lifecycle.
Seat Comfort Testing
New pressure and temperature mapping capability at Millbrook has enhanced the range of tests available to customers for measuring comfort and performance.
Further Seat Testing Capabilities
Millbrook’s capabilities include the full suite of materials tests from flammability and odour to abrasion and crocking.
Millbrook performs headrest energy absorption tests to the requirements of ECE R17.
Millbrook offers ECE R16 testing for seat belts at its seat belt anchorage facility. Other applications include wheelchairs and healthcare tie-down anchorage strength testing.
Millbrook tests seat airbags, driver/curtain airbags and instrument panel airbags to in-house standards. It offers environmental pre-conditioning to ensure that the airbags deploy correctly at a range of temperatures.
