A TLD (tuned liquid damper) is a passive control devise on top of a structure that dissipates the input excitation energy through the liquid boundary layer friction, the free surface contamination, and wave breaking. In order to design an efficient TLD, using an appropriate model to illustrate the liquid behaviour as well as knowing optimum TLD parameters is of crucial importance. In this study the accuracy of the existing models which are able to capture the liquid motion behaviour are investigated and the effective range of important TLD parameters are introduced through real-time hybrid shaking table tests.

A TLD (tuned liquid damper) is a passive control devise on top of a structure that dissipates the input excitation energy through the liquid boundary layer friction, the free surface contamination, and wave breaking. In order to design an efficient TLD, using an appropriate model to illustrate the liquid behaviour as well as knowing optimum TLD parameters is of crucial importance. In this study the accuracy of the existing models which are able to capture the liquid motion behaviour are investigated and the effective range of important TLD parameters are introduced through real-time hybrid shaking table tests.

<p><p>This report shows a survey of sate of the art different large signal RF measurement systems. Such measurement systems are discussed in detail with respect to their architecture, method of measurement, calibration, accuracy, dynamic range and bandwidth. Finally, a RF measurement system for large signal was designed and implemented. This measurement system was based on a tuned receiver. Harmonic distortion type measurements were taken by this system and time domain waveforms were reconstructed using external software.</p></p>

This report shows a survey of sate of the art different large signal RF measurement systems. Such measurement systems are discussed in detail with respect to their architecture, method of measurement, calibration, accuracy, dynamic range and bandwidth. Finally, a RF measurement system for large signal was designed and implemented. This measurement system was based on a tuned receiver. Harmonic distortion type measurements were taken by this system and time domain waveforms were reconstructed using external software.

An in-house numerical model developed at McMaster University was used in this research to investigate the effect of the wave breaking on the performance of Tuned Liquid Damper (TLD). In this model, the Volume Of Fluid VOF method was used to construct the free surface and the surface tension was taken into consideration to evaluate the wave breaking. The model was implemented on incompressible, 2D flow water within the TLD that was harmonically excited. . The ability of the TLD to cancel out the external excitation was examined via damping effectiveness of the TLD. The damping effectiveness is calculated as the ratio of the net energy experienced by the TLD to the input excitation energy; both energies were calculated as the area under the force-displacement curve. The investigation of the effect of the wave breaking was done through changing the fluid height ratios, amplitude and frequency ratios. The fluid height ratio was changed as h/L= 0.5, 0.35, 0.125 which is above and at and below the critical fluid level for wave breaking occurrence respectively. The critical height is defined as the height at which the waves start to break. It was found that at high fluid ratios wave breaking did not occur, in contrary, at critical level wave breaking did occur and even more breaking waves recorded to have taken place at much lesser levels. The effect of the fluid height ratio on the damping effectiveness of the TLD was investigated, it was seen that the damping effectiveness of the TLD improves as water level becomes shallower. The amplitude ratio was also examined; the behavior of the TLD in general did not change i.e. increasing the amplitude enhances the damping of the TLD. The frequency ratio range was selected to cover the near-resonance region. It was found that the TLD damps most excitation close to the resonance. The wave breaking occurrence was assured via the free surface visualization for several cases and found in agreement with different wave breaking shapes reported experimentally. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Tuned vibration absorbers (TVA) have been discussed in literature since the early twentieth century. These devices are implemented to suppress the system's vibration by transferring energy to the absorber mass. This research examines an electromagnetic tuned vibration absorber that can have its tuned frequency altered by gap and current variation. The advantage of an adjustable TVA is that the system can be tuned to various excitation frequencies to cancel vibration. This research examines a unique embodiment using permanent magnets and an electromagnetic absorber to alter the system dynamics. The focus is to allow changes in tuned frequency to cancel system vibrations. This research develops the electromagnetic theory, presents absorber system simulations, and tests the dynamic absorber's response. The electromagnetic field is investigated to determine the field between a stationary magnet and the absorber electromagnet. This field can be numerically calculated as the superposition of four constituent fields. With the electromagnetic field determined, the force to displacement relation between the stationary magnet and the absorber electromagnet is calculated. The best fit is determined to be an inverse square relationship. Once the spring force relation is determined, the damping mechanisms are discussed and experiments proposed to isolate the different damping mechanisms. In the simulations, it is found that by having an adjustable electromagnetic TVA the natural frequency can be adjusted 2-3% with a +10 amp input and over 50% for a variable gap. The advantage of the variable gap is that it may be adjusted once and then no additional energy is needed, while the advantage of the variable current is that the system may be rapidly altered. The experiments are undertaken to test the constructed absorber for the spring and damping force. The tests confirm the spring force relation and quantify the high damping present in the tested configuration. Then the absorber system transfer functions are recorded. The absorber is then applied to a single degree of freedom system to verify its cancellation results by a gap variation. / Ph. D.

No description available.

This paper investigates the application of tuned mass damper (TMD) systems to bridge pier systems for structural impact damage mitigation and thus reduce the risk of collapses. A bridge superstructure and substructures are designed in accordance with The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) specifications. A variety of vessel collision forces are obtained from collision testing of a scaled reinforced concrete pier. The optimal parameters of TMD systems are then determined such that the drift and displacement of the bridge superstructure are minimized for various impact scenarios. The structural impact mitigation performance of the pier equipped with the proposed optimal TMD system is compared with five different TMD systems employing the benchmark TMD optimal parameters. The uncontrolled responses are used as a baseline. It was demonstrated from the extensive simulations that the control effectiveness of the proposed TMD system was 25% better than all of the existing TMD models in reducing structure responses.

In recent years parallel computing has become ubiquitous. Lead by the spread of commodity multicore processors, parallel programming is not anymore an obscure discipline only mastered by a few.Unfortunately, the amount of able parallel programmers has not increased at the same speed because is not easy to write parallel codes.Parallel programming is inherently different from sequential programming. Programmers must deal with a whole new set of problems: identification of parallelism, work and data distribution, load balancing, synchronization and communication.Parallel programmers have embraced several languages designed to allow the creation of parallel applications. In these languages, the programmer is not only responsible of identifying the parallelism but also of specifying low-level details of how the parallelism needs to exploited (e.g. scheduling, thread distribution ...). This is a burden than hampers the productivity of the programmers.We demonstrate that is possible for the runtime component of a parallel environment to adapt itself to the application and the execution environment and thus reducing the burden put into the programmer. For this purpose we study three different parameters that are involved in the parallel exploitation of the OpenMP parallel language: parallel loop scheduling, thread allocation in multiple levels of parallelism and task granularity control.In all the cases, we propose a self-tuned algorithm that will first perform an on-line profiling of the application and based on the information gathered it will adapt the value of the parameter to the one that maximizes the performance of the application.Our goal is not to develop methods that outperform a hand-tuned application for a specific scenario, as this is probably just as difficult as compiler code outperforming hand-tuned assembly code, but methods that get close to that performance with a minimum effort from the programmer. In other words, what we want to achieve with our self-tuned algorithms is to maximize the ratio performance over effort so the entry level to the parallelism is lower. The evaluation of our algorithms with different applications shows that we achieve that goal.

The main aim of this thesis is to implement a voltage-controlled oscillator for a Galileo/GPS receiver with a center frequency of 1.5 GHz in 150 nm CMOS process. As the designed VCO has to be integrated in a phase locked loop, VCO gain is selected high enough for the PLL to lock even with process variations. A new state of art architecture called double harmonic tuned VCO is selected and designed for this GPS application. It uses a complex combination of inductors and capacitors to reduce phase-noise of the VCO by suppressing second harmonic oscillations in the tail node of VCO. The designed VCO shows significant improvement in phase-noise performance compared to a normal LC tank VCO by reducing phase-noise around 4 dBc/Hz. The VCO has a phase-noise of -128 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from center frequency with a power consumption of 5 mW and a tuning range of about 257 MHz for a 1 V tuning voltage range.