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Today's competitive food and produce markets require better understanding of the design of packaged, palletized products in order to minimize product damage during shipping, maintain quality, control costs, and address promotional and environmental concerns. To further define important design parameters, the effects of shipment vibration on palletized products were measured. The premise of this study was that the natural frequencies of the palletized product should be different from those of the vehicle in order to decrease resonant behavior that may lead to packaging failure. The study was conducted in two stages. First, the natural frequencies of the product itself were examined, then the natural frequencies of fully loaded truck trailers were investigated. A description of analytical and experimental methods for evaluating packaging design and suggestions for ways to avoid resonant excitation are presented.

Measuring the displacements in vehicle seat suspensions and the displacements the seat has to absorb may assist vehicle seat designers in better designing seats to absorb vibrations. Low frequency seat displacement is important in seat design to identify end-stop events and higher frequency shorter displacements are also important since seat components can be optimized to absorb these smaller displacements. Displacements can be directly measured with special instruments, but it would be less complicated if simple, compact accelerometers could be used to measure the seat displacements. This paper compares accelerometer-derived displacement measurements to known displacements derived from sinusoidal physics and field measured random displacements measured with potentiometers. Using known, controlled sinusoidal displacements, three lab-based experiments were conducted to determine how well accelerometers, using double integration, could measure displacements.