Composites with negative stiffness inclusions in a viscoelastic matrix are shown to have higher stiffness and mechanical damping tandelta than that of either constituent and exceeding conventional bounds. The causal mechanism is a greater deformation in and near the inclusions than the composite as a whole. Though a block of negative stiffness is unstable, negative stiffness inclusions in a com...

The UpDown scheme is a recursive scheme used to compute the stiffness matrix on a special form of sparse grids. Usually, when discretizing a Euclidean space of dimension d we need O(n) points, for n points along each dimension. Sparse grids are a hierarchical representation where the number of points is reduced to O(n · log(n)). One disadvantage of such sparse grids is that the algorithm now op...

We construct a wavelet basis on the unit interval with respect to which both the (infinite) mass and stiffness matrix corresponding to the one-dimensional Laplacian are (truly) sparse and boundedly invertible. As a consequence, the (infinite) stiffness matrix corresponding to the Laplacian on the n-dimensional unit box with respect to the n-fold tensor product wavelet basis is also sparse and b...

This paper presents a parametric stiffness analysis of the Orthoglide, a 3-DOF translational Parallel Kinematic Machine. First, a compliant modeling of the Orthoglide is conducted based on an existing method. Then stiffness matrix is symbolically computed. This allows one to easily study the influence of the geometric design parameters on the matrix elements. Critical links are displayed. Cutti...