The purpose of this study was to determine viscous properties of human muscle during plantarflexion efforts. Experiments were performed on 17 subjects with an ankle ergometer allowing sinusoidal oscillations during isometric contractions and isokinetic movements. Sinusoidal oscillations led to the expression of (i) Bode diagrams of the musculo-articular system allowing the determination of a da...

An equine fetlock joint pendulum test was studied and the influence of post mortem time and intra-articular lipid solvent on the viscous frictional response examined. Fresh equine digits (group 1, n=6 controls; group 2, n=6 lipid solvent) were mounted on a pendulum tribometer. Assuming that pendular joint damping could be modelled by a harmonic oscillator fluid damping (HOFD), damping time (τ),...

The role of damping in the spin Seebeck effect (SSE) was studied experimentally for the first time. The experiments used Y3Fe5O12 (YIG)/Pt bilayered structures where the YIG films exhibit very similar structural and static magnetic properties but very different damping. The data show that a decrease in the damping gives rise to an increase in the SSE coefficient, which is qualitatively consiste...

A limitation of a simple linear mass-spring model in describing goal directed movements is that it generates rather slow movements when the parameters are kept within a realistic range. Does this imply that the control of fast movements cannot be approximated by a linear system? In servo-control theory, it has been proposed that an optimal controller should control movement velocity in addition...

The dynamic response of an oscillating microcantilever with a gold-coated tip interacting with dissimilar functionalized silica surfaces was studied in electrolyte solutions with pH ranging from 4 to 9. Silica surfaces were chemically modified, yielding dissimilar surfaces with -Br, -NH(2), and -CH(3) functional group terminations. The relative hydrophobicity of the surfaces was characterized b...

This paper presents an entirely new tuning method of PI controller with a desired damping coefficient. We consider a plant model described by a first-order lag plus deadtime system in the process control. The ultimate sensitivity method presented by Ziegler and Nichols has been still widely used, but it has a disadvantage that gives an oscillatory response. In recent years a less oscillatory re...

We analyze a probability of atomic jumps for more than one lattice spacing in activated surface diffusion. First, we studied a role of coupling between the x and y degrees of freedom for the diffusion in a two-dimensional substrate potential. Simulation results show that in the underdamped limit the average jump length scales with the damping coefficient eta as proportional, v...

The damping ratio of chassis suspension is a key parameter for damping matching of in-wheel motor vehicles (IWMVs). Because the motor is attached to the driving wheel, the initial design method of the damping ratio for traditional cars is not entirely suitable for IWMVs. This paper proposes an innovative initial design method of the damping ratio for IWMVs. Firstly, a traveling vibration model ...