Main Roof Breakage and Vibration Induced Coal Burst Occurring in Longwall Roadways

Rock burst is one major threat to mining safety and economy. Rock burst occurring in the longwall mining roadway accounts for 85% of the total amount of burst events. This paper investigates the causality mechanism of rock burst in longwall roadways by establishing a finite elastic beam model in the working face based on the elastic foundation theory. The breakage process of the main roof and related dynamic effects are analysed. The result shows that the movement of the main roof shows free vibration under certain damping resistance. It is also found that the roof dominant vibration frequency increases with the increase in the thickness and elastic modulus of the roof. During roof vibration, the vertical stress applied on the coal mass is unloaded. The destressing of the roof-coal interface causes the coal mass in the roadway rib to slip into the roadway under the horizontal ground stress, resulting in rock burst. The possibility of rock burst increases with increase in the strength and thickness of the roof and horizontal ground stress within the coal mass. This mechanism explains the occurrence of rock burst in the mining roadway; it provides the fundamental theory for the prevention and controlling technologies of longwall roadway rock burst.

Soft-tissue vibration and damping response to footwear changes across a wide range of anthropometrics in running

Different factors were shown to alter the vibration characteristics of soft-tissue compartments during running. Changing pre-heel strike muscle activation or changing footwear conditions represents two possibilities to influence the vibration response via frequency shift or altered damping. Associated with the study of muscle pre-tuning is the difficulty in quantifying clean experimental data for the acceleration of soft-tissue compartments and muscle activities in heterogeneous populations. The purpose of this study was to determine the vibration and pre-tuning response to footwear across a wide range of participants during running and establish and describe groups formed according to the damping coefficient. 32 subjects were used for further analysis. The subjects ran at a self-selected speed (5 min) on a treadmill in two different shoes (soft & hard), while soft-tissue accelerations and muscle activation at the gastrocnemius medialis were quantified. Damping coefficients, total muscle intensity and dominant vibration frequencies were determined. Anthropometrics and skinfold measurements of the lower limbs were obtained. According to the damping coefficient response to the footwear intervention, three groups were formed, with most runners (n = 20) showing less damping in the hard shoe. Total muscle intensity, anthropometrics, and dominant vibration frequency across footwear were not different for these three groups. Most runners (84.4%) used the strategy of adjusting the damping coefficients significantly when switching footwear. Despite damping being the preferred adjustment to changes in footwear, muscle pre-tuning might not be the only mechanism to influence damping as previously suggested. Future studies should focus on the subject-specific composition of soft-tissue compartments to elucidate their contribution to vibrations.

Experimental Investigation on Vortex-Induced Vibration of Dual Pipes With Unequal Diameters in Tandem

With the massive use of buddle risers and pipelines in deep-water oil production industries, the demand to focus on the research of interference effects of dual pipe has been greatly enhanced. This paper presents interference experiments of dual flexible pipes with unequal diameters under uniform flow with Reynolds numbers ranging from 1.8E3 to 1.1E4. The pipe with larger diameter was set to be the upstream pipe. Various tandem arrangements with wall surface-to-wall surface distances being 3D to 8D were tested, where D is the smaller pipe diameter. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors were used to measure both in-plane and out-of-plane strain responses. Modal superposition method was applied to reconstruct IL mean displacement. Significant interference effect was found under the condition that wall-to-wall gap is smaller than 8D, where CF and IL vibration frequency ratio of downstream pipe equals to 1.0 and IL mean displacement gets smaller compared to those of single pipe in isolation. Moreover, a special ‘capture’ phenomenon, that the dominant vibration frequency and mode of downstream pipe were as the same as that of the upstream pipe subjecting to the uniform flows, was found when wall-to-wall distances were 4D and 8D.

Assessment of aerial and underground vibration transmission in mechanically trunk shaken olive trees

The present study analyses the transmission of vibrations generated from a multidirectional trunk shaker to olive tree structure considering both the aerial zone (trunk and branches) and the underground zone (the coarse root). The vibration characterization was conducted by measuring acceleration on several points of the tree during harvesting operations. The influence of two different heights of shaker head clamping was analysed. In addition, a dynamic probing was performed in order to evaluate soil compaction. The results showed that the vibration performed by the trunk shaker head, corresponding to an acceleration resultant of approximately 77 ms–2 with a dominant vibration frequency of 18 Hz, increased up to 106% in branches and decreased up to 90% in trunks. At root level, where the analysis was carried out at 1/3 and 2/3 of the coarse root length, the acceleration values diminished significantly to 17 ms–2 and 12 ms–2, respectively. Soil dynamic resistance was lower (36 kg cm–2) near the trees than between the trees (53 kg cm–2). The vibration transmission to the aerial and the underground parts diversely influences the dynamic behaviour of the olive tree, considering an operational frequency of a commercial trunk shaker. The assessment of vibration transmission to the aerial part could contribute to improve fruit detachment and reduce branch breaking and leaf detachment. While vibration transmission to the underground part rises new challenges considering soil compaction in olive groves.

Uncertainty in performance for linear and nonlinear energy harvesting strategies

Vibrational energy harvesters are often linear mass–spring–damper-type devices, which have their resonant frequency tuned to the dominant vibration frequency of their host environment. As such, they can be highly sensitive to uncertainties, which may arise from the imprecise characterization of the host environment or, alternatively, from manufacturing defects and tolerances. It has previously been claimed that the use of nonlinear energy harvesters may be one way to alleviate the problems of these uncertainties. This article presents a systematic uncertainty propagation study of a prototypical electromagnetic energy harvester. More specifically, the response of a linear harvester in the presence of parametric uncertainty is compared to the response of harvesters containing some common forms of nonlinearity, that is, hardening, softening, or bistability. Analytical solutions are used in combination with presumed levels of parametric uncertainty to quantify the resulting uncertainty in the power output. Consequently, these studies can determine the regions in the parameter space where a nonlinear strategy may outperform a more traditional linear approach.