Resonance - A Destructive Power: Discovery

By David Williams
28/01/2017
Resonance A Destructive Power

Discovery
Although the discovery of resonance is accredited to Galileo Galilei with his
investigations of pendulums and musical strings beginning in 1602, Nikolai Tesla, a
scientist experimenting at the turn of the 20th Century was a man obsessed with the
subject. To experiment with resonance, Tesla had attached a small vibrator to an iron
column in his New York City laboratory and started it vibrating. At certain
frequencies specific pieces of equipment in the room would vibrate. Change the
frequency and the vibration would move to another part of the room.
Unfortunately, he hadn't accounted for the fact that the column ran downward
into the foundation beneath the building. His vibrations were being transmitted all
over Manhattan. As the speed grew he hit the resonance frequency of his own
building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledgehammer to
terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived.
Background
Resonance in simple terms, is when a system is acted upon by an external
periodic driving force, whose frequency equals the natural free oscillation frequency
of the system. When the forcing function's frequency matches the natural frequency of
an object it will begin to resonate. The forcing function adds energy at just the right
moment during the oscillation cycle so that the oscillation is reinforced. This makes
the oscillation's amplitude grow larger and larger.
Resonance occurs when the system is able to store and easily transfer energy
between two different states, such as a pendulum, which transfers energy from
potential energy to kinetic energy during motion. However, anything that removes
these forms of energy tends to interfere with resonance. Damping is a means
of removing electrical or mechanical energy by converting it to heat. Examples of
damping in mechanical systems
are friction, air resistance, and
viscous drag.
Resonance occurs in
many forms and the object can
be a mechanical device or an
electronic
circuit.
The
oscillation can be a mechanical
vibration as is the case when
the string of a guitar is
strummed. Also, an object can
have more than one natural
frequency, and these are called
harmonics. A guitar string
sounds musical because it
vibrates with several harmonics
when
it
is
strummed.
Resonance can also occur in
alternating-current circuits, in
molecular structures and even
This graph shows that
f at a certain frequency
in quantum mechanics.
(natural) the rise in amplitude is substantial
By David Williams
28/01/2017
For a lightly damped linear oscillator with a resonant frequency , the intensity
of oscillations I when the system is driven with a driving frequency is typically
approximated by a formula
where is a parameter dependent on the damping of the oscillator, and is known as

the line width of the resonance which can be found as the reciprocal of the sharpness
of the resonance.
Examples of Resonance in Action
One familiar example is a playground swing, which acts as a pendulum.
Pushing a person on a swing in time with the natural interval of the swing (its
resonance frequency) will make the swing go higher and higher until reaching its
maximum amplitude, while attempts to push the swing at a faster or slower tempo
will result in smaller arcs. This is because the energy the swing absorbs is maximized
when the pushes are 'in phase' with the swing's oscillations, while some of the swing's
energy is actually extracted by the opposing force of the pushes when they are not.
A recent and unexpected example of resonance is the shaking of the Millennium
Bridge during its opening in 2000. The Millennium Bridge, a 320 meter long
suspension bridge connecting London's financial district to Bankside, opened on June
10th, 2000. Thousands of pedestrians streamed over it and at first, the bridge was still.
Then it began to sway, just slightly. Then almost step by step, the wobble intensified.
People began to tread more carefully, widening their stride and pushing their feet out
sideways, walking in near unison. The
synchrony was unintentional, but it
was these steps that were responsible
for turning the design triumph into a
very
embarrassing
engineering
problem and caused the bridge to be
immediately closed.
A paper written by Steve
Strogatz, states that the problem was
one of crowd dynamics as much as
engineering. The bridge surpassed
standards for withstanding weight and
wind but not tested for the strange
phenomenon of people unknowingly
working together, simply by walking.
This phenomenon has been known for
years by the military, and is why troops
This diagram shows how the
marching in step can create enough
wobbling bridge was corrected
vertical force to destroy a bridge. This
is why they break step at bridge crossings.
By David Williams
28/01/2017
But which came first, the bridge's movement or the synchronous strides? And
what set the whole thing off? "If the people are initially disorganized and random, if a
few of them get into sync by accident, the bridge would become unstable," Strogatz
says. With a certain critical number of pedestrians, the wobbling becomes so large that
it forces people to stride in unison. This initial phenomenon could be linked to chaos
theory, investigated by Edward Lorenz. This theory is stated as sensitive dependence
on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically
change the long-term behaviour of a system. The small effect of each footstep, when
combined together caused a large affect in the behaviour of the bridge. It was the fact
that at one instance these footsteps matched the natural frequency of the bridge, and
so the change in the amplitude of motion each step caused was dramatically increased.
With each subsequent step, the amplitude was further increased due to the frequency
of walking equalling the natural frequency of the bridge. The swaying sideways
increased significantly and caused the grand opening to also be the grand closing.
Since this event, ninety shock absorbers have been installed to dampen the affect of
synchronous walking.
However, the most well-known bridge fault due to resonance was the total
collapse of the Tacoma Narrows. On 1 July 1940, a new bridge was opened up at the
narrowest point in Puget Sound, and right from the beginning, even before the
construction was completed, the bridge behaved in a peculiar way. Whenever there
was a slight breeze, ripples would run along the bridge. After a while local people
began calling the bridge affectionately by the name Galloping Gertie.
Four months after the bridge was opened, on 7 November 1940, a new mode of
oscillations showed up in the bridge in a prevailing south-westerly wind of about 42
mph. Instead of rippling motions down the bridge, twisting motions set in. At 11
o'clock in the morning that day, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed. An inquest
into the collapse determined that the bridge had been built according to the best
engineering standards of the day, so what brought the bridge down?
The central span was 853 meters long and only 12 meters wide between the
cable stays. A new method of calculating stresses (known as deflection theory) was
used which allowed lighter, more flexible and less expensive designs. However it was
this extreme flexibility that proved to be the weakness in the design of the bridge. The
vertical oscillations that were noticeable in construction became so large that a
supporting cable at mid-span snapped, unbalancing the load and creating severe
torsional forces, collapsing the bridge.
By David Williams
28/01/2017
The source of the motion of the bridge was always known to be the wind. The
building up of the oscillations is seen as being due to resonance. In order for the
bridge to undergo resonance, there must be a force causing the bridge to move which
is periodic, regular and which matches the natural frequency of oscillation of the
bridge. This means that any thoughts of gusting winds
being responsible can be disregarded as they would have
had to be very regular and this phenomenon, apart from
being unlikely, was not witnessed. The long-standing
theory behind the collapse of the bridge is that the
oscillations were due to the shedding of vortices from the
bridge. As air flows round an object, swirls of air, called
Vortices
vortices, are carried away by the wind. This is due to air at different speeds
combining. The vortices generate alternating high and low pressure regions on
the downwind side of the body, in this case the bridge. Such vortices are called
Strouhal vortices and are shed at a rate determined by the equation
Fs = SU/D
where Fs is the frequency of vortex shedding, S is the Strouhal number (a constant for
a given body shape), U is the velocity of the air flow and D is the width of the deck.
The thickness of the deck was 2.44m and on the day of the collapse, the wind speed
was 68 km/h, which, with an appropriate Strouhal number gives a shedding frequency
of about 1 Hz.
This frequency is equal to the natural frequency of the bridge and so caused the
initial twisting amplitude to increase. With each oscillation the swinging and twisting
motion increased, until it was large enough to collapse the bridge. This was a
torsional vibration mode whereby when the left side of the roadway went down, the
right side would rise, and vice versa, with the center line of the road remaining still. It
was also a second torsional mode, in which the midpoint of the bridge remained
motionless while the two halves of the bridge twisted in opposite directions. This can
be seen in the photos below. This twisting motion caused the mid supporting cable to
snap as it was put under incredible stress. The bride then overloaded and collapsed.
Conclusion
Throughout history we have learned the destructive power of resonance, and
sometimes this has been from disasters. We have also shown that the driving force of
this resonance can come from a multitude of sources, such as people walking, wind
vortices and vibrations from vehicles. Also the affect of such resonance has been
discovered. In the case of bridges, three affects are clear. Vertical vibration was seen
By David Williams
28/01/2017
most commonly when large numbers of people march over a bridge, causing collapse
from fierce vertical shaking. Also we see lateral motion caused, such as in the
Millennium Bridge, and in the case of the Tacoma Narrows, torsional twisting motion
can cause collapse. The Large amplitudes caused by this resonance causes the loads
on the bridge structures to be dramatically increased and can cause critical
components to fail. As technology increases, and knowledge of such factors is also
increased, we have developed techniques in reducing the destruction caused by this
physical process. Resonance is something that occurs daily within our lives, and is
extremely helpful in certain circumstances, but when uncontrolled and unexpected
can have disastrous consequences.
Bibliography
1) (Background of resonance)
http://www.intuitor.com/resonance/swings.html
2) (Information on resonance)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051103080801.htm
3) (Resonance equations and graphs)
http://www.incois.gov.in/Tutor/science/illustrations/lecture33/resonance.html
4) (Chaos theory)
http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html
5) (Tacoma Narrows background)
http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/anm/tacoma/tacoma.html
6) (Tacoma Narrows collapse)
http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/anm/tacoma/tac07.gif
7) (Diagram of Millennium Bridge)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16922844.600-the-bridge-of-sways.html
8) (Strouhal vortices)
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=1499A2C159E1C
DD738096DE79CC3D67F.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=392361

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By David Williams

Resonance A Destructive Power

where is a parameter dependent on the damping of the oscillator, and is known as

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