Reactive Control Deployable Seat Headrest

Airline comfort has been a high priority of research because there are so many factors that affect the comfort of the passenger, with the most important one being the actual airline seat itself. The apex of this seat is the Bombardier Nuage Seat. However, the problem with them is that the headrest has to be manually adjusted by the passenger.

The main goal of this thesis report is to replace the headrest of the Nuage Seat with a headrest that would react to the force applied by the head of the passenger while not creating a large space between the headrest and the rest of the seat. There were two versions of the headrest: one was a motorized headrest raising; however, that was dropped for the manual headrest raising since the gap between the headrest and the rest of the seat was far too large.

The final design of the manual headrest raising had a headrest range of 120°–38° and a gap of 60 mm, which means that it was successful in the goal of being able to replace the current Nuage Seat while maintaining a small gap between the headrest and the rest of the seat.

The report contains multiple types of methodology, including mathematical modeling, SolidWorks modeling, and 3D printing testing. All of these methods were used to find the best solution.