Biomechanically inspired modelling of pedestrian-induced forces on laterally oscillating structures

Despite considerable interest among engineers and scientists, bi-directional interaction between walking pedestrians and lively bridges has still not been well understood. In an attempt to bridge this gap a biomechanically inspired model of the human response to lateral bridge motion is presented and explored. The simple inverted pendulum model captures the key features of pedestrian lateral balance and the resulting forces on the structure. The forces include self-excited components that can be effectively modelled as frequency-dependent added damping and mass to the structure. The results of numerical simulations are in reasonable agreement with recent experimental measurements of humans walking on a laterally oscillating treadmill, and in very good agreement with measurements on full-scale bridges. In contrast to many other models of lateral pedestrian loading, synchronisation with the bridge motion is not involved. A parametric study of the model is conducted, revealing that as pedestrians slow down as a crowd becomes more dense, their resulting lower pacing rates generate larger self-excited forces. For typical pedestrian parameters, the potential to generate negative damping arises for any lateral bridge vibration frequency above 0.43 Hz, depending on the walking frequency. Stability boundaries of the combined pedestrian–structure system are presented in terms of the structural damping ratio and pedestrian-to-bridge mass ratio, revealing complex relations between damping demand and bridge and pedestrian frequencies, due to the added mass effect. Finally it is demonstrated that the model can produce simultaneous self-excited forces on multiple structural modes, and a realistic full simulation of a large number of pedestrians, walking randomly and interacting with a bridge, produces structural behaviour in very good agreement with site observations.     

Crowd-structure interaction in lively footbridges under synchronous lateral excitation: A literature review

This paper aims to provide a review and critical analysis of the state of the art concerning crowd-structure interaction phenomena on footbridges. The problem of lateral vibrations induced by synchronised pedestrians, namely the Synchronous Lateral Excitation, is specifically addressed. Due to the multi-physic and multi-scale nature of the complex phenomenon, several research fields can contribute to its study, from structural engineering to biomechanics, from transportation engineering to physics and applied mathematics. The different components of the overall coupled dynamical system – the structure, the crowd and their interactions – are separately analysed from both a phenomenological and modelling point of view. A special attention is devoted to those models, which explicitly account for the interaction between mechanical and living systems.     

Visualization of crowd synchronization on footbridges

Abstract  

This paper proposes a framework for the visualization of crowd walking synchronization on footbridges. The bridge is modeled as a mass-spring system, which is a weakly damped and driven harmonic oscillator. Both the bridge and the pedestrians walking on the bridge are affected by the movement of each other. The crowd acts according to local behavioral rules. Each pedestrian is provided with a kinematic walking system. We extend a current mathematical model of crowd synchronization on footbridges to include human walking model and crowd simulation techniques. We run experiments to evaluate the influence of these extensions on synchronization.     

Optimal beam diameter for lateral optical forces on microspheres at a water-air interface

Optical tweezers with a low numerical aperture microscope objective is used to manipulate the microspheres at the water-air interface. In this letter, we determine the optimal optical trap for the lateral manipulation of microspheres at a water-air interface. The experimental results show that the trapping force is influenced by the expansion of the trapping beam at the back aperture of the objective. The optimal filling ratio of 0.65 is suggested for lateral optical manipulation at the water-air interface. The lateral trapping forces at the water-air interface are theoretically investigated with the ray-optics model. The numerical results show that the lateral trapping forces can be changed by shrinking the diameter of the trapping laser beam. The numerical results are in accordance with the experimental results.     

Range effects in the identification of lateral position

Experiments on the identification of interaural time and interaural amplitude differences were conducted to evaluate the effects of stimulus range on identification performance. Three stimulus sets, large range (LR), small-range center (SRC), and small-range side (SRS), were used in experiments on interaural time and amplitude identification. As expected, data for both sets of measurements show worse resolution for LR than SRC or SRS, demonstrating that the ability to distinguish between two fixed interaural differences can be strongly influenced by the total range of such differences in the stimulus set.     

Vibration serviceability of footbridges under human-induced excitation: a literature review

Increasing strength of new structural materials and longer spans of new footbridges, accompanied with aesthetic requirements for greater slenderness, are resulting in more lively footbridge structures. In the past few years this issue attracted great public attention. The excessive lateral sway motion caused by crowd walking across the infamous Millennium Bridge in London is the prime example of the vibration serviceability problem of footbridges. In principle, consideration of footbridge vibration serviceability requires a characterisation of the vibration source, path and receiver. This paper is the most comprehensive review published to date of about 200 references which deal with these three key issues.The literature survey identified humans as the most important source of vibration for footbridges. However, modelling of the crowd-induced dynamic force is not clearly defined yet, despite some serious attempts to tackle this issue in the last few years.The vibration path is the mass, damping and stiffness of the footbridge. Of these, damping is the most uncertain but extremely important parameter as the resonant behaviour tends to govern vibration serviceability of footbridges.A typical receiver of footbridge vibrations is a pedestrian who is quite often the source of vibrations as well. Many scales for rating the human perception of vibrations have been found in the published literature. However, few are applicable to footbridges because a receiver is not stationary but is actually moving across the vibrating structure.During footbridge vibration, especially under crowd load, it seems that some form of human–structure interaction occurs. The problem of influence of walking people on footbridge vibration properties, such as the natural frequency and damping is not well understood, let alone quantified.Finally, there is not a single national or international design guidance which covers all aspects of the problem comprehensively and some form of their combination with other published information is prudent when designing major footbridge structures. The overdue update of the current codes to reflect the recent research achievements is a great challenge for the next 5–10 years.     

Levitation and lateral forces between a point magnetic dipole and a superconducting sphere

The dipole–dipole interaction model is employed to investigate the angular dependence of the levitation and lateral forces acting on a small magnet in an anti-symmetric magnet/superconducting sphere system. Breaking the symmetry of the system enables us to study the lateral force which is important in the stability of the magnet above a superconducting sphere in the Meissner state. Under the assumption that the lateral displacement of the magnet is small compared to the physical dimensions of our proposed system, analytical expressions are obtained for the levitation and lateral forces as a function of the geometrical parameters of the superconductor as well as the height, the lateral displacement, and the orientation of the magnetic moment of the magnet. The dependence of the levitation force on the height of the levitating magnet is similar to that in the symmetric magnet/superconducting sphere system within the range of proposed lateral displacements. It is found that the levitation force is linearly dependent on the lateral displacement whereas the lateral force is independent of this displacement. A sinusoidal variation of both forces as a function of the polar and azimuthal angles specifying the orientation of the magnetic moment is observed. The relationship between the stability and the orientation of the magnetic moment is discussed for different orientations.     

Experimental identification of nonpointlike dark-matter candidates

We show that direct dark-matter detection experiments can distinguish between pointlike and nonpointlike dark-matter candidates. The shape of the nuclear recoil-energy spectrum from pointlike dark-matter particles, e.g., neutralinos, is determined by the velocity distribution of dark matter in the galactic halo and by nuclear form factors. Typical cross sections of nonpointlike dark matter, for example, Q-balls, have a new form factor, which decreases rapidly with the recoil energy. A signal from nonpointlike dark matter is expected to peak near the experimental threshold and to fall off rapidly at higher energies.     

Influence of maglev force relaxation on the forces of bulk HTSC subjected to different lateral displacements above the NdFeB guideway

This paper studied the influence of maglev force relaxation on the force (both levitation and guidance forces) of bulk high-temperature superconductor (HTSC) subjected to different lateral displacements above a NdFeB guideway. Firstly, the maglev forces relaxation property of bulk HTSC above the permanent-magnet guideway (PMG) was studied experimentally, then the levitation and guidance forces were measured by SCML-2 measurement system synchronously at different lateral displacements, some times later(after relaxation), the forces were measured again as the same way. Compared to the two measured results, it was found that the change of the levitation force was larger compared to the case without relaxation, while the change of the guidance force was smaller. In addition, the rate of change of levitation force and guidance force was different for different maximum lateral displacements. This work provided a scientific analysis for the practical application of the bulk HTS.     

Electrostatic forces in micromanipulation: Experimental characterization and simulation including roughness

Manipulation by contact of objects between 1 m and 1 mm are often disturbed by adhesion between the manipulated object and the gripper. Electrostatic forces are among the phenomena responsible for this adhesive effect. Analytical models have been developed in the literature to predict electrostatic forces. Most models have been developed within the framework of scanning probe microscopy, i.e. for a contact between a conducting tip and a metallic surface. In our study, we developed a simulation tool based on finite elements modeling. The strength of this model lies in the fact that it integrates roughness parameters. Measurements of electrostatic forces in function of roughness were conducted by atomic force microscopy. The experimental results were compared with the simulation results showing very good correlation. This demonstrates the influence of surface topography on electrostatic forces, especially for very small separation distances and proves the utility of the simulation tool in designing surfaces with controlled adhesion. Some application fields to which these results can be applied are drug delivery devices and micromanipulation tools.     

Experimental identification of viscous damping in linear vibration

This paper is concerned with the experimental evaluation of the performance of viscous damping identification methods in linear vibration theory. Both existing and some new methods proposed by the present authors [A.S. Phani, J. Woodhouse, Viscous damping identification in linear vibration, Journal of Sound and Vibration 303 (3–5) (2007) 475–500] are applied to experimental data measured on two test structures: a coupled three cantilever beam with moderate modal overlap and a free–free beam with low modal overlap. The performance of each method is quantified and compared based on three norms and the best methods are identified. The role of complex modes in damping identification from vibration measurements is critically assessed.     

基于横向热流抑制的半导体激光芯片封装实验研究

为降低半导体激光芯片的慢轴远场发散角,提高其慢轴方向的光束质量,设计了横向热流抑制的封装结构。利用热沉间的物理隔离,削弱了半导体激光芯片慢轴方向上的温度梯度,有效降低了半导体激光芯片慢轴方向的发散角。采用热分析模拟了不同封装结构下芯片发光区的温度分布,并对波长915 nm的窄条宽半导体激光芯片进行封装。实验结果表明,在工作电流15 A,封装在隔离槽长4 mm,脊宽120 μm刻槽热沉上的芯片,其慢轴远场发散角由12.25°降低至10.49°,相应的光参量积（BPP）由5.344 mm·mrad 降低至4.5763 mm·mrad,慢轴方向亮度提升了约5.5%。实验结果表明,横向热流抑制的封装结构可以有效地削弱半导体激光芯片慢轴方向上由热透镜效应引起的高阶模激射,从而降低其慢轴远场发散角。     

Experimental study of magnetic forces on normal and null flux coil arrangements in the inductive levitation system

We report on measurements of lift and drag forces exerted by various small-scale current-carrying superconducting coils, placed near a large rotating disk. In detail we have studied the influences of shape and arrangement of the coils, as well as the influences of plate thickness, velocity and suspension height. In some experiments the drag force was measured under constant load condition. Most of the experimental results are compared with exact calculations based upon the general theory recently given by Miericke and Urankar [1] for infinitely wide but arbitrarily thick sheet tracks. The agreement between experiment and theory was generally good, and we believe that predictions for large-scale systems can be made with confidence.     

Experimental identification of electromagnetically induced transparency in magnetized plasma

We report the first experimental identification of the new wave branch at electron cyclotron frequency produced by the injection of a frequency-matched intense pump wave in magnetized plasma [A.?G. Litvak and M.?D. Tokman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 095003 (2002); G. Shvets and J.?S. Wurtele, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 115003 (2002)], which is a classical phenomenon analogous to electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in quantum systems. By using a frequency-sweep interferometer, we directly detected the dispersion relation of the plasma EIT branch for propagation parallel to the background magnetic field. The bandwidth of the EIT window was correlated with the pump-wave electric field and was found to agree with the theoretical prediction.     

粗晶材料晶粒散射波的实验鉴别

在利用超声波束对粗晶材料样品或工件进行检测时，接收回波中，除伤波、底波外，还存在晶粒散射波及其它干扰杂波。本文对晶粒散射波主要特征：晶粒散射波随传播时间出现的最大值位置；晶粒散射波最早到达时间；以及传播过程中晶粒散射波的频谱特性进行了实验验证。其中，用脉冲频谱合成方法，计算了双探买发．收复合声场声轴上声压分布，据此对最大值的出现位置给予了物理解释。并用短时傅立叶变换分析了声波传播过程中晶粒散射波的频谱特性。获得了一些有用结果。     

Constraint on parity-violating muonic forces

Using the nonobservance of missing mass events in the leptonic kaon decay K→μX, we place a strong constraint on exotic parity-violating gauge interactions of the right-handed muon. By way of illustration, we apply it to an explanation of the proton size anomaly that invokes such a new force; scenarios in which the gauge boson decays invisibly or is long lived are constrained.     

Experimental observation of negative lateral displacements of microwave beams transmitting through dielectric slabs

It was theoretically predicted that when a beam of light travels through a thin slab of optically denser medium in the air, the emerging beam from the slab will suffer a lateral displacement that is different from the prediction of geometrical optics, that is, the Snell’s law of refraction and can be zero and negative as well as positive. These phenomena have been directly observed in microwave experiments in which large angles of incidence are chosen for the purpose of obtaining negative lateral displacements.