Dynamic Response of a Vehicle-Bridge Expansion Joint Coupled System

The paper investigates the dynamic vibration property of the vehicle-bridge expansion joint coupled system with the proposed model. The dynamic response of the expansion joint under the action of the vehicle is the key factor affecting the life of the expansion joint. The changes of contact state and tire geometric characteristics were frequently left aside in the past to simplify the tire model. This is because the contact between tire and expansion joint is a very complex process. But this will seriously underestimate the impact effect of the vehicle on the expansion joint. In this paper, a dynamic mathematical model of the 2-axle vehicle-modular bridge expansion joint (MBEJ) coupled system is established by introducing a flexible roller tire model. The influence of tread rigid displacement and change in the tire contact patch length are considered in the dynamic model. Based on this model, the characteristics of the dynamic tire load and the center beam vibration displacement in the coupled system are obtained by simulation. The results show that the maximum dynamic tire load of the vehicle occurs at the end of the bridge deck behind the MBEJ, so local structure reinforcement needs to be considered. The interaction between the front and rear wheels of the 2-axle vehicle can be ignored. The vehicle position, vehicle velocity, gap width, and spring stiffness of the center beam bearing have significant effects on the impact factors of tire load and center beam vibration displacement. The impact factor of tire load may exceed the recommended values of Chinese and European bridge codes. These should be taken seriously.

Displacement Sensing of an Active String Actuator by an Optical Fiber

We have fabricated a string-shaped actuator called “Active string” that has high contractile displacement/force by accumulating thin pneumatic artificial muscles using the string production process. However, displacement control of the active string is challenging because general bulky and rigid displacement sensors are not suitable for the sensor element of the active string. Therefore, in this report, a flexible optical fiber sensor is combined with the active string to enable sensing of its displacement. As the active string contracts, the radius of curvature of the optical fiber decreases, and light intensity propagating in the optical fiber decreases due to bending loss. The experimental results showed that the optical fiber sensor value changed with corresponding to the displacement of the active string. It shows the possibility that it is possible to make a displacement estimation of the displacement of the active string using an optical fiber sensor.

Arch bridges subject to pier settlements: continuous vs. piecewise rigid displacement methods

Settlements severely affect historic masonry arch bridges worldwide. There are countless examples of structural dislocations and ruins in recent years due to severe settlements at the base of pier foundations, often caused by shipworm infestation of wooden foundations or scouring and riverbed erosion phenomena. The present paper proposes an original way to approach the failure analysis of settled masonry arch bridges. The proposed method combines two different 2D numerical models for the prediction of masonry arch bridge capacity against settlements and for safety assessment. The first one is the Piecewise Rigid Displacement method, i.e. a block-based limit analysis approach using the well known Heyman's hypotheses; the second one is a continuous Finite Element approach. The case study of the four-span Deba Bridge (Spain, 2018) failure is presented with the aim to illustrate how the methods work. The failure analysis produced satisfactory results by applying both methods separately, in confirmation of their reliability. Their combination also allowed to obtain a significantly reduction in computational cost and an improvement of prediction accuracy. A sensitivity and a path-following analysis were also performed with the aim to demonstrate the robustness of the presented method. The obtained simulations highlighted that the results do not depend on the friction angle and that a proper prediction of the evolution of the structural behavior can be obtained only taking into account geometric nonlinearities. Such results demonstrate once again that in settled masonry arches geometry prevails over the mechanical parameters. The current study paves the way for the fruitful use of the proposed approaches for a wider range of applications, as, for example, the mechanism identification or the displacement capacity assessment of masonry structures under overloading as seismic loads.

Boundary Element Modeling of Pyroelectric Solids with Shell Inclusions

The paper presents general boundary element approach for analysis of thermoelectroelastic (pyroelectric) solids containing shell-like electricity conducting permittive inclusions. The latter are modeled with opened surfaces with certain boundary conditions on their faces. Rigid displacement and rotation, along with constant electric potential of inclusions are accounted for in these boundary conditions. Formulated boundary value problem is reduced to a system of singular boundary integral equations, which is solved numerically by the boundary element method. Special attention is paid to the field singularity at the front line of a shell-like inclusion. Special shape functions are introduced, which account for this square-root singularity and allow accurate determination of field intensity factors. Numerical examples are presented.

A New Semi-Analytical Method for Elasto-Plastic Analysis of a Deep Circular Tunnel Reinforced by Fully Grouted Passive Bolts

The use of fully grouted passive bolts as a reinforcement technique has been widely applied to improve the stability of tunnels. To analyze the behaviors of passive bolts and rock mass in a deep circular tunnel, a new semi-analytical solution is presented in this work based on the finite difference method. The rock mass was assumed to experience elastic–brittle–plastic behavior, and the linear Mohr–Coulomb criterion and the nonlinear generalized Hoek–Brown criterion were employed to govern the yielding of the rock mass. The interaction and decoupling between the rock mass and bolts were considered by using the spring–slider model. To simplify the analysis process, a bolted tunnel was divided into a bolted region and an unbolted region, while the contact stress at the bolted–unbolted interface and the rigid displacement of the bolts were obtained using two boundary conditions in combination with the bisection method. Comparisons show that the results obtained using the proposed solution agree well with those from the commercial numerical software and the in situ test. Finally, parametric analyses were performed to examine the effects of various reinforcement parameters on the tunnel’s stability. The proposed solution provided a fast but accurate estimation of the behavior of a reinforced deep circular tunnel for preliminary design purposes.

A Method to Determine the Coincidence of MRI-Guided Linac Radiation and Magnetic Isocenters

To assure accurate treatment delivery on any image-guided radiotherapy system, the relative positions and walkout of the imaging and radiation isocenters must be periodically verified and kept within specified tolerances. In this work, we first validated the multiaxis ion chamber array as a tool for finding the radiation isocenter position of a magnetic resonance–guided linear accelerator. The treatment couch with the array on it was shifted in 0.2-mm increments and the reported beam center position was plotted against that shift and fitted to a straight line, in both X and Y directions. From the goodness-of-fit and intercepts of the regression lines, the accuracy and precision were conservatively estimated at 0.2 and 0.1 mm, respectively. This holds true whether the array is irradiated from the front or from the back, which allows efficient collecting the data from the 4 cardinal gantry angles with just 2 array positions. The average isocenter position agreed to within at most 0.4 mm along any cardinal axis with the linac vendor’s film-based procedure, and the maximum walkout radii were 0.32 mm and 0.53 mm, respectively. The magnetic resonance imaging isocenter walkout as a function of gantry angle was studied with 2 different phantoms, one employing a single fiducial at the center and another extracting the rigid displacement values from the distortion map fit of 523 fiducials dispersed over a large volume. The results were close between the 2 phantoms and demonstrated variation in the magnetic resonance imaging isocenter location as high as 1.3 mm along a single axis in the transverse plane. Verification of the magnetic resonance imaging isocenter location versus the gantry angle should be a part of quality assurance for magnetic resonance-guided linear accelerators.

Digital image correlation through image registration in the frequency domain

The present work analyses displacement field computations for several digital image correlation test cases obtained through the application of image registration in the Fourier domain. The applied method relies on the properties of the discrete Fourier transform with regard to the cross-correlation function to find the rigid displacement between two subsets. The computed displacement fields were compared to their analogous values obtained through a commercial digital image correlation code. The test cases cover both two-dimensional and three-dimensional digital image correlation and make use of the ability of the developed method to calculate the translation and rotation between subsets from images at different loading states, as well as its capacity to match subsets from two cameras of a stereo rig. The presented analysis aims to contribute to the investigation of the use of correlation in the frequency domain as the basis for an alternative to conventional digital image correlation which could provide advantages in terms of robustness and efficiency, particularly in field measurements, where the lack of control over lighting and other factors impacting image quality requires a system which is optimised towards low dependence on the optimal quality of these conditions.

A calibration method of kinematic parameters for serial industrial robots

Purpose – Calibrating kinematic parameters is one of the efficient ways to improve the robot's positioning accuracy. A method based on the product-of-exponential (POE) formula to calibrate the kinematic parameters of serial industrial robots is proposed. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The forward kinematics is established, and the general positioning error model is deduced in an explicit expression. A simplified model of robot's positioning error is established as both the error of reference configuration and the error of rigid displacement of the base coordinating system with respect to the measuring coordinating system are equivalently transferred to the zero position errors of the robot's joints. A practical calibration model is forwarded only requiring 3D measuring based on least-squares algorithm. The calibration system and strategy for calibrating kinematic parameters are designed. Findings – By the two geometrical constrains between the twist coordinates, each joint twist only has four independent coordinates. Due to the equivalent error model, the zero position error of each joint can cover the error of reference configuration and rigid displacement of the robot base coordinating system with respect to the measuring coordinating system. The appropriate number of independent kinematic parameters of each joint to be calibrated is five. Originality/value – It is proved by a group of calibration experiments that the calibration method is well conditioned and can be used to promote the level of absolute error of end effector of industrial robot to 2.2 mm.