Pontoon bridge using a single 'o'. The U.S. military differentiated between the bridge itself ("ponton") and the floats used to provide buoyancy ("pontoon"). The original word was derived from Old French "ponton", from Latin "ponto" ("ferryboat"), from "pons" ("bridge"). When designing a pontoon bridge, the civil engineer must take into consideration the Archimedes' principle: Each pontoon can support a load equal to the mass of the water that it displaces. This load includes the mass of the bridge and the pontoon itself. If the maximum load of a bridge section is exceeded, one or more pontoons become submerged. Flexible connections have to
Acoustic suspension acoustic suspension, with a separate, sealed air-space, even if the woofer itself is not. One notable exception to this was the Sonus Faber Stradivari Homage which uses a ported enclosure for the midrange. The two most common types of speaker enclosure are acoustic suspension (sometimes called pneumatic suspension) and bass reflex, so they are worth comparing. In both cases, the tuning affects the lower end of the driver's response but above a certain frequency, the driver itself becomes the dominant factor and the size of the enclosure and ports (if any) become irrelevant. In general, acoustic suspension systems (driver +