OBJECTIVES Exposing a hind leg of a rat to vibration induces an injury to the sciatic nerve--a so called conditioning lesion. After such injury induced by vibration the regenerative capacity of the nerve is improved and can be detected as an increased axonal outgrowth from a test crush lesion to the same nerve. The purpose was to study whether the effect of a conditioning lesion induced by vibr...

Risk Based Inspection (RBI) has been used for some time to optimise inspection schedules based on assessing the risk of various corrosion related degradation mechanisms. However, one degradation mechanism that has been traditionally overlooked is that of vibration induced fatigue. A proactive methodology for assessment of vibration induced fatigue was published in 2000 as part of a Joint Indust...

A methodology for measuring the vibration energy absorbed into the fingers and the palm exposed to vibration is proposed to study the distribution of the vibration energy absorption (VEA) in the fingers-hand-arm system and to explore its potential association with vibration-induced white finger (VWF). The study involved 12 adult male subjects, constant-velocity sinusoidal excitations at 10 diff...

Floor vibrations induced by human walking were investigated in a reinforced concrete structure. Six experimental floor structures were built in laboratories with the same dimensions and boundary conditions. Subjective tests were performed to assess the vibration serviceability of the floor structures. First, the subjects were asked to walk across a floor and then to rate the intensity of the vi...

Vibration is an excitatory stimulus for both vestibular and proprioceptive afferents. Vibration applied either to the skull or to the neck muscles of subjects after unilateral vestibular deafferentation induces nystagmus and a shift of the subjective visual horizontal. Previous studies have ascribed these effects to vibratory stimulation of neck muscle proprioceptors. Using scleral search coils...

We performed a whole-body mapping study of the effect of unilateral muscle vibration, eliciting spindle Ia firing, on the control of standing and walking in humans. During quiet stance, vibration applied to various muscles of the trunk-neck system and of the lower limb elicited a significant tilt in whole body postural orientation. The direction of vibration-induced postural tilt was consistent...

The vibration of fungal cultures was evaluated to determine its potential effect on the dispersal of airborne fungal microorganisms suspected of being pathogens. An artificial vibration system, which simulates the actual environmental vibration of fungal structures, was designed and constructed for this purpose. Experiments featured the use of low-frequency vibrations similar to those induced b...