Please send me an Email if you are going to use this package. Also, you are welcome to participate in the Shock & Vibration courses. Thank you,Tom IrvineEmail: tom@irvinemail.org * * * License information: The software packages on the following links are freely placed in… Read more
Two incidents at the same wind farm, seven weeks apart, tell a single engineering story that’s worth unpacking carefully. On February 2, 2026, an 80-meter Vestas turbine at the Yeongdeok wind farm in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, snapped roughly a third of the way… Read more
A reader recently asked a sharp question in the comments on one of my posts: what’s the best analysis approach for determining thermally induced stresses and forces in reinforced concrete structures, given that standard commercial workflows using software like ETABS seem far from robust and… Read more
\; K_{ISCC} \] where \( \sigma \) is the applied stress, \( a \) is the crack depth, and \( Y \) is a geometry factor. Eyebar 330’s tiny 0.1-inch flaw sat below this threshold for decades, then crossed it after four decades of slow… Read more
A departure from the usual structural dynamics and forensic engineering material — a personal aside on speech as an acoustic information channel, prompted by a conversation about why some languages sound faster than others. Speech as a Communication Channel: Why Fast Languages Aren’t Actually Faster… Read more
Anatomy of a Railway Leaf Spring: Axlebox-Mounted Primary Suspension Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, “Leaf spring on a train.jpg”, showing the primary suspension of a piece of German rolling stock. The photo below is one of the clearest close-up views of a European-style axlebox-mounted leaf spring… Read more
SKF Image Before the Accelerometer: Touch, Hearing, Stethoscopes, and Stroboscopes in Machinery Vibration Monitoring Long before FFT analyzers, wireless accelerometers, and machine-learning anomaly detection, machinery condition monitoring was done with the human hand, the human ear, a screwdriver, and a flashing lamp. These methods are… Read more
Union Pacific has begun spraying white paint on the sides of its rails in the hottest sections of its 32,000-mile network. The program, which entered targeted deployment in 2025, uses a hi-rail truck with a spray rig to coat both faces of the rail web… Read more
The London Eye: A Sound & Vibration Field Study from Inside a Capsule Revised 5 July 2026 to correct the interpretation of the low-frequency harmonic series. Riding the London Eye on 5 July 2026, I ran an impromptu two-sensor experiment from my seat: a smartphone… Read more
Image credit: https://www.sintechnology.com/portfolio-articoli/hole-drilling/ Drilling a hole into a structure is normally something an engineer tries to avoid — holes are stress concentrators, fatigue initiation sites, and sources of structural weakness. But in one important application, drilling a small hole is precisely how engineers measure the… Read more
The Ramesses II bust (Younger Memnon), British Museum, Room 4. The large diagonal fracture across the chest is clearly visible. A circular hole, likely an ancient lifting attachment point, is visible on the left side of the chest. Photograph by Tom Irvine, July 2026. Standing… Read more