Related papers: Periodically fighting shake, rattle and roll

The slinky, released from rest hanging under its own weight, falls in a peculiar manner. The bottom stays at rest until a wave hits it from above. Two cases -- one unphysical one where the slinky is able to pass through itself, and the…

It is demonstrated that sonic crystals (periodic structures of sound scatterers) can be used to design acoustic barriers that attenuate efficiently broadband noise. Traffic noise is chosen here as an example in which our design procedure is…

Soil liquefaction is a significant natural hazard associated with earthquakes. Some of its devastating effects include tilting and sinking of buildings and bridges, and destruction of pipelines. Conventional geotechnical engineering…

Treatises on vibrations devote large space to study the dynamical behavior of an elastic system subject to known external tractions. In fact, usually a "system" is not an isolated body but it is part of a chain of mechanisms which disturb…

We present experiments on the dynamic buckling and fragmentation of slender rods axially impacted by a projectile. By combining the results of Saint-Venant and elastic beam theory, we derive a preferred wavelength lambda for the buckling…

Collisionless plasma systems are often studied using fully kinetic simulations, where protons and electrons are treated as particles. Due to their computational expense, it is necessary to reduce the ion-to-electron mass ratio $m_i/m_e$ or…

We present a minimal one-dimensional deterministic continuous dynamical system that exhibits chaotic behavior and complex transport properties. Our model is an overdamped rocking ratchet that is periodically kicked with a delta function…

This study aims to investigate whether fatigue damage induced by bottom wave slamming can be a failure mode important to consider when sizing a marine structural element. The body exposed to wave impacts is assumed to have a shape and…

We calculate stable arrangements for a single superfluid vortex pinned to the wall of a stationary cylindrical container. We find that, independent of the details of the pinning site, stable vortices must subtend most of the cell…

Quantum vortices with more than a single circulation quantum are usually unstable and decay into clusters of smaller vortices. One way to prevent the decay is to place the vortex at the centre of a convergent (draining) fluid flow, which…

Ba\v{z}ant et al. have proposed a model of a gravity-driven collapse of a tall building which collapses in a progressive-floor collapse after the failure of a single storey. The model allows the re-computation of the structural resistance…

This work is focused to study the development and control of the laminar vortex breakdown of a flow enclosed in a cylinder. We show that vortex breakdown can be controlled by the introduction of a small fixed rod in the axis of the…

Single and double-slit experiments are performed with two microwave billiards with the shapes of a rectangle, respectively, a quarter stadium. The classical dynamics of the former is regular, that of the latter is chaotic. Microwaves can…

Splashing occurs when a liquid drop hits a dry solid surface at high velocity. This paper reports experimental studies of how the splash depends on the roughness and the texture of the surfaces as well as the viscosity of the liquid. For…

Turbulent boundary layers exhibit a universal structure which nevertheless is rather complex, being composed of a viscous sub-layer, a buffer zone, and a turbulent log-law region. In this letter we present a simple analytic model of…

We investigate the effect of resonant temporal forcing on an anisotropic system that exhibits a Hopf bifurcation to obliquely traveling waves in the absence of this forcing. We find that the forcing can excite various phase-locked…

Wave steering by artificial materials (for example, phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials) is a fascinating frontier in modern physics and engineering, but suffers from bulky sizes and intractable challenges in fabrication. Here, a…

We describe a simple mechanical system, a ball rolling along a specially-designed landscape, that mimics the dynamics of a well known phenomenon, the two-bounce resonance of solitary wave collisions, that has been seen in countless…

The character of turbulence depends on where it develops. Turbulence near boundaries, for instance, is different than in a free stream. To elucidate the differences between flows, it is instructive to vary the structure of turbulence…

Most of us will have at some time thrown a pebble into water, and watched the ripples spread outwards and fade away. But now there is a way to reverse the process, and make those ripples turn around and reconverge again, ... and again, and…