Comfort is one of the most important aspects for footwear manufacturers and designers since it is directly related to selling success and users’ health. In spite of this, and for diverse causes, the analysis of the comfort generated by a specific footwear design is a task within the product development process which remains unresolved. The main cause is the absence of a tool able to develop comfort tests in a reliable and fast way, affordable for the companies in terms of knowledge and costs.
The main objective for this thesis is the development of a software application, based in computer assisted mathematical models fed by real data, able to perform virtual functional tests on virtual footwear designs, and relate the result of these tests with users’ comfort perception. Such tool allows detecting and eliminating footwar design errors (with influence in comfort) from the early steps of the product development processes, increasing in that way the perceived comfort when using the footwear, as well as the efficiency of the product design process.
The work has been divided into three main workpackages. First, a study was carried out analizing the the relation between users’ peception of the functional properties defining the user-footwear interaction and the users’ perception of global comfort. With that aim, tests with machines were performed to characterize footwear functional properties, and questionnaires with users were carried out to characterize their peception when using the footwear. This analysis permited, on one hand, obtaining a predictive model of global comfort from footwear functional properties measured with machines, and on the other, idenfiying the relevant functional properties for comfort perception. Next, work continued with the development of mathematical models of virtual functional tests, able to cuantify the functional properties of footwear from CAD footwear designs and materials’ and components’ properties obtained through real tests (CAT approach). Finally, the global comfort model and the virtual functional tests models were implemented in a software application. In addition, it was implemented and coded the specific algorithms, the databases necessary to configure the virtual tests and the routines to feed the comfort model.
The main contributions of this thesis come from the application of a multidimensional approach to the study of the relations between the functional properties and comfort perception, and from the consideration of the specific requirements (capacities and needs) of the designers as users of the CAE tool. As a result, the developed work has permited obtaining a model able to predict comfort perceived by the users from objective measures of a CAD footwear design, and a software application integrating this model, thus allowing considering users’ comfort needs from the begining of the design process, eliminating the necessity of manufacturing physical prototypes.
The developed work opens the way to new research and development lines as the application of the methodology validated in this thesis to different footwear and user typologies and environmetal conditions, or the analysis of the psychological aspects in comfort perception (e.g. aesthetical perferences), and combine them with the functional properties in a new comfort model with increased predictive capacity. Finally, the analysis of the integration of the developed tool in the industrial environment could provide new clues for the improvement of the tool, mainly regarding its usability and adaptability to the daily tasks of the professionals of the footwear sector.