Comfort, road holding and safety of passenger cars are mainly influenced by an appropriate design of suspension systems. Improvements of the dynamic behaviour can be achieved by implementing semi-active or active suspension systems. In these cases, the correct design of a well-performing suspension control strategy is fundamental for obtaining satisfying results. In-Operation Modal Analysis allows the experimental structural identification in real operating conditions: moving from output-only data, leading to modal models linearised around the more interesting working points and, in the case of controlled systems, providing the needed information for the optimal design and verification of the controller performance. All these characters are needed for the experimental assessment of vehicle suspension systems. In the paper, two suspension architectures are considered equipping the same car type. The former is a semi-active commercial system, the latter a novel prototypic active system. For the assessment of suspension performance, two different kind of tests have been considered, proving ground tests on different road profiles and laboratory four poster rig tests. By OMA-processing the signals acquired in the different testing conditions and by comparing the results, it is shown how this tool can be effectively utilised to verify the operation and the performance of those systems, by only carrying out a simple, cost-effective road test.

In this paper, we investigate underwater energy harvesting of a parallel array of nominally identical ionic polymer metal composites (IPMCs) subjected to low frequency base excitation in water. The IPMCs are connected in parallel and shunted with a varying resistor. We model the IPMCs as slender beams with uniform cross section undergoing small oscillations in an otherwise quiescent viscous fluid. We utilize a boundary element approach to compute the hydrodynamic loading on each structure, which is due to the oscillations of the whole array. Leveraging recent findings on sensing in ionic polymer metal composites, we propose a coupled electromechanical model for predicting energy harvesting as a function of the IPMCsí impedance and the base excitation. To validate our theoretical predictions, we perform experiments on an in-house fabricated array of five centimeter-size composites, which we characterize on a dedicated test rig. We experimentally determine the power harvested by varying the excitation frequency in the broad range 2ñ35 Hz and the shunting resistance from 1 to 1000 Ohm.

In this paper, we study flexural vibrations of two thin beams that are coupled through an otherwise quiescent viscous fluid. While most of the research has focused on isolated beams immersed in placid fluids, inertial and viscous hydrodynamic coupling is ubiquitous across a multitude of engineering and natural systems comprising arrays of flexible structures. In these cases, the distributed hydrodynamic loading experienced by each oscillating structure is not only related to its absolute motion but is also influenced by its relative motion with respect to the neighbouring structures. Here, we focus on linear vibrations of two identical beams for low Knudsen, KeuleganñCarpenter and squeeze numbers. Thus, we describe the fluid flow using unsteady Stokes hydrodynamics and we propose a boundary integral formulation to compute pertinent hydrodynamic functions to study the fluid effect. We validate the proposed theoretical approach through experiments on centimetre-size compliant cantilevers that are subjected to underwater base-excitation. We consider different geometric arrangements, beam interdistances and excitation frequencies to ascertain the model accuracy in terms of the relevant nondimensional parameters.

Method for the identification of the poles and modal vectors of a road or rail vehicle provided with at least two wheels and in working condition, by means of the analysis of the movements or speeds or accelerations (output of the system) acquired in assigned measuring points of said vehicle, wherein said poles and modal vectors are determined by means of the fitting of the data relating to said outputs of the system on the basis of a mathematical model which describes the interaction between road or railway and said vehicle, characterized by hypothesizing that said vehicle moves at constant speed on a rectilinear trajectory or bend with constant radius, hypothesizing that said vehicle moves on a homogeneous and ergodic surface, whose roughness has a Gaussian distribution and that said at least two wheels move on a profile or on a plurality of profiles parallel with respect to each other, hypothesizing that the inlets induced by the road or rail surface on said vehicle cannot be traced back to a sequence of white noises and are correlated with respect to each other in time and/or space.