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This paper presents design considerations for a shock tube experimental rig used to investigate the dynamic failure mechanisms of shell geometries subjected to water shock impact loading. In such setup, it is desirable that the drive pressure used within the tube can provide a wide range of impulsive loads on the test structures and some flexibility can be achieved on the applied pulse durations. With this aim a review of various existing shock tube experimental setup is presented and choices are made based on scientific merits. Finally design parameters are drawn for right set of conditions required for the experiments.

This study discusses the tracking trajectory issue of the exoskeleton under the bounded disturbance and designs an useful tracking trajectory control method to solve it. By using the proposed control method, the tracking error can be successfully convergence to the assigned boundary. Meanwhile, the chattering effect caused by the actuators is already reduced, and the tracking performance of the pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) elbow exoskeleton is improved effectively.

A prescribed performance sliding mode control method was developed in this study to fulfill the joint position tracking trajectory task on the elbow exoskeleton driven by two PAMs. In terms of the control structure, a dynamic model was built by conforming to the adaptive law to compensate for the time variety and uncertainty exhibited by the system. Subsequently, a super-twisting algorithm-based second-order sliding mode control method was subjected to the exoskeleton under the boundedness of external disturbance. Moreover, the prescribed performance control method exhibits a smooth prescribed function with an error transformation function to ensure the tracking error can be finally convergent to the pre-designed requirement.

From the theoretical perspective, the stability of the control method was verified through Lyapunov synthesis. On that basis, the tracking performance of the proposed control method was confirmed through the simulation and the manikin model experiment.

As revealed by the results of this study, the proposed control method sufficiently applies to the PAMs elbow exoskeleton for tracking trajectory, which means it has potential application in the actual robot-assisted passive rehabilitation tasks.

The paper aims to present a numerical modeling procedure for the analysis of liquid sloshing in a flexible tank subjected to an external excitation, with taking into account the effects of fluid–structure interaction (FSI).

A numerical model based on coupling a two-phase flow solver and an elastic solid solver is developed in OpenFOAM code. The Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation is adopted for the two-phase Navier–Stokes equations in a moving domain. The volume of fluid (VOF) method is applied for the air–liquid interface tracking. The finite volume method is used for the spatial discretization of both the fluid and the structure dynamics equations. The FSI coupling problem is solved by an explicit coupling scheme. The model is validated for linear and nonlinear sloshing cases. Then, it is used to analyze the effects of the liquid sloshing on the dynamic response of the tank and the effects of the tank flexibility on the liquid sloshing.

The obtained results show that the flexibility of the tank walls amplifies the amplitude of the sloshing and increases the fluctuation period of the air–liquid interface. Furthermore, it is found that the bending moment acting on the tank walls may be underestimated when rigid walls assumption is adopted as usually done in sloshing tank modeling. Also, tank walls flexibility causes a phase shift in the free surface dynamic response.

A review of previous studies on liquid sloshing in flexible tanks revealed that FSI effects have not been clearly and comprehensively analyzed for large-amplitude liquid sloshing. Many physical and numerical aspects of this problem still require clarifications and enhancements. The added value of the present work and its originality lie in the investigation of large-amplitude liquid sloshing in flexible tanks by using a staggered coupling approach. This approach is carried out by an original combination of a linear solid solver with a two phase fluid solver in OpenFOAM code. In addition, FSI effects on some response quantities, identified and analyzed herein, have not been found in the previous works.