A floor is the bottom surface of a room or vehicle. Floors vary from simple dirt in a cave to many layered surfaces made with modern technology. Floors may be stone, wood, bamboo, metal or any other material that can support the expected load.
Fluid bearings are bearings in which the load is supported by a thin layer of rapidly moving pressurized liquid or gas between the bearing surfaces. Since there is no contact between the moving parts, there is no sliding friction, allowing fluid bearings to have lower friction, wear and vibration than many other types of bearings. Thus, it is possible for some fluid bearings to have near-zero wear if operated correctly.
A road surface or pavement is the durable surface material laid down on an area intended to sustain vehicular or foot traffic, such as a road or walkway. In the past, gravel road surfaces, macadam, hoggin, cobblestone and granite setts were extensively used, but these have mostly been replaced by asphalt or concrete laid on a compacted base course. Asphalt mixtures have been used in pavement construction since the beginning of the 20th century and are of two types: metalled (hard-surfaced) and unmetalled roads. Metalled roadways are made to sustain vehicular load and so are usually made on frequently used roads. Unmetalled roads, also known as gravel roads, are rough and can sustain less weight. Road surfaces are frequently marked to guide traffic.
Noise-cancelling headphones are a special type/kind of headphones which suppress unwanted ambient sounds using active noise control. This is distinct from passive headphones which, if they reduce ambient sounds at all, use techniques such as soundproofing.
An anechoic chamber is a room designed to stop reflections or echoes of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from energy entering from their surroundings. This combination means that a person or detector exclusively hears direct sounds, in effect simulating being outside in a free field.
Soundproofing is any means of impeding sound propagation. There are several basic ways to reduce sound: increasing the distance between source and receiver, decoupling, using noise barriers to reflect or absorb the energy of the sound waves, using damping structures such as sound baffles for absorption, or using active antinoise sound generators.
The Bridgewater Hall is a concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build in the 1990s, and hosts over 250 performances a year. It is home to the 165-year-old Hallé Orchestra as well as to the Hallé Choir and Hallé Youth Orchestra and it serves as the main concert venue for the BBC Philharmonic.
Sound Transmission Class is an integer rating of how well a building partition attenuates airborne sound. In the US, it is widely used to rate interior partitions, ceilings, floors, doors, windows and exterior wall configurations. Outside the US, the ISO Sound Reduction Index (SRI) is used. The STC rating very roughly reflects the decibel reduction of noise that a partition can provide. The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech.
Noise control or noise mitigation is a set of strategies to reduce noise pollution or to reduce the impact of that noise, whether outdoors or indoors.
Vibration isolation is the prevention of transmission of vibration from one component of a system to others parts of the same system, as in buildings or mechanical systems. Vibration is undesirable in many domains, primarily engineered systems and habitable spaces, and methods have been developed to prevent the transfer of vibration to such systems. Vibrations propagate via mechanical waves and certain mechanical linkages conduct vibrations more efficiently than others. Passive vibration isolation makes use of materials and mechanical linkages that absorb and damp these mechanical waves. Active vibration isolation involves sensors and actuators that produce disruptive interference that cancels-out incoming vibration.
Acoustic transmission is the transmission of sounds through and between materials, including air, wall, and musical instruments.
The Alan Turing Building, named after the mathematician and founder of computer science Alan Turing, is a building at the University of Manchester, in Manchester, England. It houses the School of Mathematics, the Photon Science Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA). The building is located in the Chorlton-on-Medlock district of Manchester, on Upper Brook Street, and is adjacent to University Place and the Henry Royce Institute.
National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering is an organisation in Da'an District, Taipei, Taiwan.
The Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC) is a building and research center owned by Boston University. The 10-floor 235,000 sq ft (21,800 m2) building opened in June 1997, finished at a cost of $78.4 million. The center specializes in developing and commercializing new products for the photonics industry, spanning the fields of biomedical engineering, nanoscience, physics, astronomy, and chemistry. The two lowest floors include classroom and lab spaces used by the College of Engineering; a number of engineering faculty also have their offices and research labs in the building.
Concrete is produced in a variety of compositions, finishes and performance characteristics to meet a wide range of needs.
The Centre for Device Thermography and Reliability is a research facility at the University of Bristol, a research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. Founded in 2001, by Professor Kuball the centre is engaged in thermal and reliability research of semiconductor devices, in particular for microwave and power electronic devices. It is housed in the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, a noted physics laboratory associated with the Physics department of the university. The centre is noted for developing an integrated Raman-IR thermography technique to probe self-heating in silicon, GaAs and other devices. This enables unique thermal analysis of semiconductor devices on a detailed level not possible before. These techniques are critical in understanding the reliability of Compound semiconductor devices applicable in power and microwave devices and in the long term as a viable replacement for Silicon devices as it approaches the end of scaling.
J. C. Séamus Davis is an Irish physicist whose research explores the world of macroscopic quantum physics. Davis concentrates upon the fundamental physics of exotic states of electronic, magnetic, atomic and space-time quantum matter. A specialty is development of innovative instrumentation to allow direct atomic-scale visualization or perception of the quantum many-body phenomena that are characteristic of these states.
The Sydney Nanoscience Hub is a nanoscience facility of The University of Sydney Nano Institute at the University of Sydney in Camperdown, Sydney, Australia. The laboratories in the building are isolated from outside influences such as vibration, electromagnetic fluctuations, temperature and atmospheric pressure variation, the air in the laboratories is also filtered to be free of dust.
Andreas J. Heinrich is a physicist working with scanning tunneling microscopy, quantum technology, nanoscience, spin excitation spectroscopy, and precise atom manipulation. He worked for IBM Research in Almaden for 18 years, during which time he developed nanosecond scanning tunneling microscopy which provided an improvement in time resolution of 100,000 times, and combined x-ray absorption spectroscopy with spin excitation spectroscopy. In 2015 his team combined STM with electron spin resonance, which enables single-atom measurements on spins with nano-electronvolt precision REF1, REF2. In 2022 his team demonstrated the extension of ESR-STM to individual molecules REF3. Heinrich was also principal investigator of the stop-motion animated short film A Boy and His Atom filmed by moving thousands of individual atoms. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of the Heinrich Rohrer Medal of the Japan Society of Vacuum and Surface Science.
