A series has been developed of closed-system isolators which provide patients with the same effective control of microbial infection as is possible in the laboratory animal. These isolators are used to protect susceptible patients from exogenous infection as well as to prevent the spread of dangerous pathogens from infected patients. The six models of isolators are designed for use in operating...

The cart-and-pendulum system is a highly nonlinear and under-actuated system that is a great source of interest and motivation for researchers all over the world. There are various configurations of the cart-and-pendulum system that finds wide applications in areas of manufacturing, robotics and control. This paper presents an offline mode control of the Flexible Inverted Pendulum (FIP), which ...

Scrap tire rubber pad (STRP) isolators are made from scrap automobile tires, which expected to be a low-cost material for earthquake-resistant design of low-to-medium-rise buildings in developing countries. This paper describes the seismic vulnerability unbonded STRP (U-STRP) base-isolated masonry building using finite element method. The three-dimensional model U-STRP is placed between foundat...

In this paper, validation of a model for the speed dependency of friction is presented. Based on the shape of the friction – speed curve, the model assumes that calculation of friction at any speed would need an estimate of friction at very low speed, and the knowledge of its variation with speed described by the Stribeck curve. Two existing models developed at LCPC are then coupled to predict ...

Variable stiffness structures that enable a wide range of efficient load-bearing and dexterous activity are ubiquitous in mammalian musculoskeletal systems but are rare in engineered systems because of their complexity, power, and cost. We present a new negative stiffness-based load-bearing structure with dynamically tunable stiffness. Negative stiffness, traditionally used to achieve novel res...

Tribometers are mechanical devices used to measure walkway coefficient of friction (COF) for the purpose of assessing slip risk. The purpose of this study was to define a tribometer reference standard and use it to assess the performance of various tribometers. Eighty subjects were randomly assigned to walk across one of four wet walkway surfaces (polished black granite, porcelain, vinyl compos...

We present a hybrid physical-dynamic tire/road friction model for applications of vehicle motion simulation and control. We extend the LuGre dynamic friction model by considering the physical model-based adhesion/sliding partition of the tire/road contact patch. Comparison and model parameters relationship are presented between the physical and the LuGre dynamic friction models. We show that th...

This paper presents an application of the feedback error learning technique for online control of an inverted pendulum which has uncertain friction nonlinearity. In order to build up online adaptive learning control, i) the preliminary offline training and the scaling factor for the neural network to escape from the local minimum, and ii) twostage learning scheme are introduced. After some lear...

This paper presents the validation of a computational tool that serves to obtain continuous measurements of moving objects. The software uses techniques of computer vision, pattern recognition and optical flow, to enable tracking of objects in videos, generating data trajectory, velocity, acceleration and angular movement. The program was applied to track a ball around a simple pendulum. The me...

This work aims at enhancing the understanding and to provide improved models of the dynamic behavior of rubber vibration isolators which are widely used in mechanical systems. Initially, a time domain model relating compressions to component forces accounting for preload effects, frequency and dynamic amplitude dependence is presented. The problem of simultaneously modelling the elastic, viscoe...