Weight of the load and its characteristics is considered to be the important risk factor for low back disorders (LBD) among manual materials handlers. Determining weight of the load and the amount of load a person can lift is important in minimizing the incidence of LBD. Among various methods like isometric, isoinertial and isokinetic, isoinertial approach of lifting evaluation is best as it is...

The processing of woody biomass waste piles for use as fuel instead of burning them was 11 investigated. At each landing slash pile location, a 132 kW grapple excavator was used to transfer 12 the waste piles into a 522 kW horizontal grinder. Economies of scale could be expected when 13 grinding a larger pile, although the efficiency of the loading operation might be diminished. Here, 14 three ...

Piliated and nonpiliated Neisseria gonorrhoeae organisms were added on top of confluent layers of HEC-1-B cells, each maintained on a microporous Transwell-COL membrane. The bacteria released into the lower chamber were characterized with respect to the following virulence determinants: pili, which mediate adherence to target host cells; PilE, the major pilus subunit protein; and PilC, which is...

Solid particles in protoplanetary disks that are sufficiently super-solar in metallicity overcome turbulence generated by vertical shear to gravitationally condense into planetesimals. Super-solar metallicities result if solid particles pile up as they migrate starward due to aerodynamic drag. Previous analyses of aerodynamic drift rates that account for mean flow differences between gas and pa...

A numerical method is presented herein to study soil-pile interaction systems in a stratified media. The method is based on a coupling of the finite element method and the boundary element method. The near field is modeled by the finite elements whereas the far field is modeled by the boundary dement formulation using the multi-layer dynamic fimdamental solution that satisfies the radiation con...

ABSTRACT: The problem of lateral load induced on piles under earthquake has been plaguing professional engineers, geo-technical investigators and researchers alike for quite some time. The normal practice is to ensure that the fixed base shear of column does not exceed the static shear load capacity of piles. The inertial and stiffness effect of pile is usually ignored in dynamic earthquake ana...

A review is given of the analogous dependence on reciprocal square root of grain size or crack size of fracture strength measurements reported for steel and other potentially brittle materials. The two dependencies have much in common. For onset of cleavage in steel, attention is focused on relationship of the essentially athermal fracture stress compared with a quite different viscoplastic yie...

[1] Dust grains on the lunar surface are exposed to UV radiation and solar wind plasma and can collect electrical charges, leading to their possible lift-off and transport in the presence of near-surface electric fields. Motivated by the long-standing open questions about the physics of electrostatic lunar dust transport, we investigated the dynamics of dust grains on a conducting surface in a ...

Underwater bubbles can inhibit sound transmission through water due to density mismatch and concomitant reflection and absorption of sound waves. For the present study, a perforated rubber hose was used to produce a bubble curtain, or screen, around pile-driving activity in 6-8-m depth waters of western Hong Kong. The percussive hammer blow sounds of the pile driver were measured on 2 days at d...

Autonomous manipulation in unstructured environments presents roboticists with three fundamental challenges: object segmentation, action selection, and motion generation. These challenges become more pronounced when unknown manmade or natural objects are cluttered together in a pile. We present an end-to-end approach to the problem of manipulating unknown objects in a pile, with the objective o...