Extreme events suppression in a suspended aircraft seat system under extreme environment

In extreme flight environments, extreme oscillations may occur in aircraft seats, seriously endangering passengers’ comfort and safety. It is important to quantitatively study extreme events in the aircraft seats and control them. In this paper, a two-degree-of-freedom suspended seat is used to describe aircraft seats and a nonlinear energy sink (NES) is employed to suppress extreme events. The extreme flight environments are characterized by non-Gaussian Lévy noise. We discover extreme events by observing the system responses and the probability density functions. By investigating the relationship between seat and attachment and the effect of Lévy noise on extreme events, the quantification of extreme events is achieved. Furthermore, the mechanism by which NES fulfills extreme event suppression is explored. The mean first-passage time and the probability of extreme events are calculated, and the impacts of NES parameters on the performance of extreme events suppression are performed. The results indicate that, damping and linear stiffness coefficients help extreme events suppression. These findings contribute to improving the theoretical guidance for designing such systems.