For most of recent tall buildings, one characteristic is that their building shapes vary with height such as taper and setback, and this implies that the distribution of their structural components may also vary with height. Because of these structural variations, although the sectional shapes of these buildings are symmetric, it is difficult to say whether or not they are structurally symmetric. The acceleration responses of structurally asymmetric tall buildings are larger than those of non-eccentric buildings, thus raising the possibility of problems during strong winds and typhoons. This paper describes wind tunnel tests carried out using building models with height variations and acceleration response analyses, and discusses the resulting response characteristics. For tapered and setback buildings, although the across-wind accelerations are larger than those of a square building, the total root-mean-square accelerations remain small because of smaller along-wind and torsional rms accelerations. And it was found that the effects of statistical couplings between along-wind force and other two forces are negligible.

The objective of this study is to provide basic information on coupled motions in thoracic spine during lateral bending from a neutral position for football and baseball players as well as for general university students. In the experiment, a total of 30 subjects participated(football players: 10, baseball players: 10, general students: 10). All subjects were in their 20’s. The subjects sat on a chair with lumbar support in a neutral position and bent to the right. As a result, for baseball players, coupled motions were observed in the opposite direction of the lateral bending in all parts of thoracic spine. For both football players and general students, coupled motions were observed in the same direction. These results confirmed that unilateral movements like baseball could affect coupled motions.

The Mobile Harbor(MH) is a new transportation platform that can load and unload containers to and from very large container ships in the sea. This loading and unloading by crane can be performed with only very small movements of the MH in waves because MH is operated outside of the harbor. For this reason, an anti-rolling tank(ART) and an active mass driving system(AMD) were designed to reduce MH's roll motion, especially at the natural frequency of MH. In the conceptual design stage, it is difficult to confirm the design result of theses anti-rolling devices without modeling and simulation tools. Therefore, the coupled MH and anti-rolling devices' dynamic equations in waves were derived and a simulation program that can analyze the roll reduction performance in various conditions, such as sea state, wave direction, and so on, was developed. The coupled equations are constructed as an eight degrees of freedom (DOF) motion that consists of MH's six DOF dynamics and the ART's and AMD's control variables. In order to conveniently include the ART's and AMD's control dynamics in the time domain, MH's radiated wave force was described by an impulse response function derived by the damping coefficient obtained in the frequency domain, and wave exciting forces such as Froude-Krylov force and diffraction force and nonlinear buoyancy were calculated at every simulation time interval. Finally, the roll reduction performances of the designed anti-rolling devices were successfully assessed in the various loading and wave conditions by using a developed simulation program.