Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) Billah and Scanlan (1991) reported that in fact, many physics textbooks (for example Resnick et al. and Tipler et al.) wrongly explain that the cause of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge was externally forced mechanical resonance. Resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at larger amplitudes at certain frequencies, known as the system's natural frequencies. At these frequencies, even relatively small periodic driving forces can produce large amplitude vibrations, because the system stores energy. For example, a child using a swing realizes that if the pushes are properly timed, the swing can move with a very
Fourier amplitude sensitivity testing Fourier amplitude sensitivity testing Fourier amplitude sensitivity testing (FAST) is a variance-based global sensitivity analysis method. The sensitivity value is defined based on conditional variances which indicate the individual or joint effects of the uncertain inputs on the output. FAST first represents conditional variances via coefficients from the multiple Fourier series expansion of the output function. Then the ergodic theorem is applied to transform the multi-dimensional integral to a one-dimensional integral in evaluation of the Fourier coefficients. A set of incommensurate frequencies is required to perform the transform and most frequencies are irrational. To facilitate computation a set of integer