A comparison of leaf-spring with aircushion trailer suspensions in the transport environment

Packaging engineers need to be able to accurately determine the forces present in the shipping environment in order to protect packaged goods. The purpose of this study was to determine the vertical vibration levels measured in three separate truck-trailer suspension systems; conventional leaf-spring, conventional air-ride and damaged air-ride. The main conclusion reached in this study is that the air-ride suspension when maintained gives lower power density (PD) levels on all road surfaces studied. A damaged air-ride suspension and leaf-spring suspension are very similar in response frequencies, although the damaged air-ride produces higher vibration levels at lower frequencies.     

Thermal post buckling behavior of rectangular antisymmetric cross-ply composite plates

Summary The thermal post buckling behavior of simply-supported, antisymmetric cross-ply plates with immovable edges is investigated in this paper. For this purpose, a one term approximation for the inplane and transverse displacements is assumed and Rayleigh-Ritz method is used to obtain the equations of equilibrium. The question, whether the true thermal buckling (bifurcation buckling under thermal loads) exists for such plates is also addressed to. The conditions under which the thermal buckling in the classical sense occurs are derived. It is shown that nonlinear bending stiffness for such plates is direction dependent, because of an extra quadratic nonlinear term in addition to the usual cubic nonlinear term in the governing equilibrium equation. Results are presented for various plate configurations.     

Secondary web-flange interaction in framed-tube buildings

In the conventional plane-frame model of framed-tube buildings, only the primary interaction between the web frame and the flange frame is considered, through vertical shear transfer at corner columns. In addition to this, a secondary interaction takes place due to horizontal shear transfer at each floor level, through the floor slab having high in-plane rigidity. This interaction causes a discrepancy in member forces of a few bottom and top storeys. A simple modification is suggested in the form of an additional cantilever column connected to the conventional plane-frame model by axial force transfer members at every floor level. The improved model yields member forces in all the storeys that are very close to those obtained using 3D analysis.     

Air bearing design, optimization, stability analysis andverification for sub-25 nm flying

Three sub-25 nm fly height sliders are presented for near contact recording. The designs are geared towards the goal of achieving 10 Gb/in ² areal density. The optimization procedure presented shows promise for facilitating achievement of this goal. The dynamic simulations show the stability of these designs when disturbed from their steady state conditions     

Adaptive solutions to the mutual exclusion problem

Summary Algorithms for mutual exclusion that adapt to the current degree of contention are developed. Afilter and a leader election algorithm form the basic building blocks. The algorithms achieve system response times that are independent of the total number of processes and governed instead by the current degree of contention. The final algorithm achieves a constant amortized system response time. Manhoi Choy was born in 1967 in Hong Kong. He received his B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineerings from the University of Hong Kong in 1989, and his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1991. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, and distributed algorithms. Ambuj K. Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, an M.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 1984, and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur in 1982. His research interests are in the areas of adaptive resource allocation, concurrent program development, and distributed shared memory.A preliminary version of the paper appeared in the 12th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed ComputingWork supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9008628 and CCR-9223094