We investigated the natural resonance properties and damping characteristics of rat macrovibrissae (whiskers). Isolated whiskers rigidly fixed at the base showed first-mode resonance peaks between 27 and 260 Hz, principally depending on whisker length. These experimentally measured resonant frequencies were matched using a theoretical model of the whisker as a conical cantilever beam, with Youn...

We have developed software for fully automated tracking of vibrissae (whiskers) in high-speed videos (>500 Hz) of head-fixed, behaving rodents trimmed to a single row of whiskers. Performance was assessed against a manually curated dataset consisting of 1.32 million video frames comprising 4.5 million whisker traces. The current implementation detects whiskers with a recall of 99.998% and ident...

Rodents use their whiskers (vibrissae) for tactile perception. Our artificial whiskers follow the basic design of the follicle of rodent vibrissae. In experiments with the artificial whiskers, we have explored tactile perception based on active whisking, and found the deflection amplitude or velocity provides the localization information of a target obeject. Based on this localization approach,...

The failure mechanism was determined to be tin whiskers emanating from the tin plating on the internal pins. The high conductivity, pure tin crystalline whiskers bridged the 10-mil spark gap to cause the test failures. The fusing current of the whiskers was in the range of the source current of the test equipment. This caused inconsistencies during problem identification and verification at the...

In their natural environment, rodents use their whiskers to locate and distinguish between objects of different textures and shapes. They do so by moving their whiskers actively as well as passively, through body and head movements. To determine the mechanisms by which surface coarseness is translated into neuronal discharges through passive whisker movements, we monitored head movements of awa...

Article history: Received 22 May 2017 Received in revised form 7 July 2017 Accepted 8 July 2017 Available online 19 July 2017 Tin and tin-alloyed electroplated films are known to be susceptible to whisker growth under a range of conditions,manyofwhich result in the generation of compressive stresses in thefilm. Compressive stress is considered to be one of the primary causes for whisker nucleat...

The anatomical representations of the large facial whiskers, termed barrels, are topographically organized and highly segregated in the posteromedial barrel subfield (PMBSF) of rat layer IV primary somatosensory cortex. Although the functional representations of single whiskers are aligned with their appropriate barrels, their areal extents are rather large, spreading outward from the appropria...

The purpose of this study was to investigate how aragonite (calcium carbonate) whiskers influenced the strengthening and carbonating of alpha-tricalcium phosphate (alpha-TCP) based calcium phosphate cement. Aragonite whiskers of 0.95 microm width with an aspect ratio of 6.6 were prepared. The cement powder, alpha-TCP containing 0-50 mass% aragonite whisker, was mixed with 0.6 mol/L NaH2PO4 solu...

To fully utilize the siliceous whiskers and improve the mechanical properties of oil-well cement, the cement composites with different additions of siliceous whiskers were prepared, and analyzed by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), mechanical testing, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and infrared spectrum analysis. The results showed that the addition of 2% siliceous whiskers could slightly ...