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The load that will not hold still — page 4

Essays 73 to 96 of 150 on this thread, in the same order.
The damping that stops helping. The storey drift's white-noise root-mean-square as the bearings' damping is raised from 2 to 50 per cent, each divided by the exact value at 2 per cent. The classical analysis promises that every increment helps, and at 50 per cent predicts 0.20 of the lightly damped drift. The exact analysis flattens: 0.34 at 20 per cent and 0.29 at 50, because the damping force at the bearings is transmitted into the superstructure's own mode, which the classical analysis has decoupled from it. Dynamics

The damping that belongs to no mode

Give every mode its own damping ratio and throw the rest of the damping matrix away, and an isolated building's periods and damping come out right to within a fifth of a per cent. Its storey drift at the superstructure's frequency comes out six times too small. The bearings' dashpot pushes on both modes at once, and the more of it there is the less extra damping buys: the classical analysis promises the drift keeps falling, and it stops.

Settling down or walking away, cycle by cycle. The total plastic hinge rotation of the beam after each cycle of loading — span 1, both, span 2, neither — with the midspan load at 0.98, 1.02, 1.05, 1.10 times the shakedown load of 126.3 kN. At 0.98 it stops at 0.59 mrad. At 1.02 it grows 4.57 mrad a cycle. At 1.05 it grows 11.43 mrad a cycle. At 1.10 it grows 22.86 mrad a cycle. Nothing collapses in any single cycle; above the shakedown load the beam walks. Materials

The load it can carry once

A two-span beam whose loads come and go span by span collapses at 150 kN under any one arrangement, and walks at 127. Between the two it can carry every arrangement once and none of them forever: each cycle leaves a few more milliradians of rotation at the support and a midspan fifteen millimetres lower. Melan's theorem finds the limit as the last residual moment line that fits, Koiter's as a mechanism no single load state can drive, and a cycle-by-cycle calculation walks exactly where both say it will.

Half the life is spent growing the first half-millimetre. The crack length against time for a detail starting with a 0.50 mm flaw under 800 cycles a day of the same five-band traffic the S-N calculation used, integrated by Paris's law. It reaches 1 mm after 91.2 years, 2 mm after 131.3, 10 mm after 172.9 and its critical length of 125.7 mm after 195.8. The curve is nearly flat and then nearly vertical, because the rate goes as the cube of ΔK and ΔK goes as the square root of the crack: the crack spends most of its life being too small to find and the rest being too large to ignore. The dashed lines are the crack lengths at which each band of traffic starts doing anything at all. Materials

The loops a crack grows on

A Miner sum reduces a hundred years of traffic to a number and throws away everything below the cut-off — on this bridge, a third of the vehicles doing exactly none of the damage. Integrate the same spectrum as a crack instead and that third grows thirty-seven per cent of the crack, because a cut-off is a statement about a constant-amplitude test and a crack's threshold is a length rather than a stress. The two calculations disagree about the life by a third and about which vehicles matter entirely.

The same cycles, and two different lives. Two sequences made of exactly the same cycles — blocks of 6.00M at 40 N/mm² alternating with blocks of 0.22M at 90, on a detail starting with a 0.50 mm flaw. Taking the small cycles first, the crack reaches its critical 87.7 mm after 12.36M cycles; taking the large ones first, after 6.36M. Miner's sum at the moment of failure is 0.99 for the first and 0.68 for the second, so a rule that predicts failure at a sum of one is right to within a per cent about the first and 48 per cent unconservative about the second. The mechanism is on the axes: ΔK rises with the crack, so a large block met late finds a longer crack and does more with it. Materials

The record played backwards

Miner's rule adds damage, and a sum has no order. A crack does, twice over: a large block met late finds a longer crack and does more with it, and an overload leaves a plastic zone that slows everything after it. The same cycles rearranged fail at 12.4 million or at 6.4, and a Miner sum that is right to one per cent about the first is out by half about the second. One cycle in four million can add fifty-four per cent to a life.

The two knees the environment takes away. The design S-N curve for a category 71 detail and the two shapes a corrosive environment leaves. In air the slope is three to the constant-amplitude limit at 52.3 N/mm², five to the cut-off at 28.7, and nothing below it. With the cut-off removed the second branch continues. Under free corrosion there is one slope of three all the way down and no knee at all. The faint lines are the five bands of the traffic: three of them sit below the cut-off — an ordinary lorry, a van and a car, 90 per cent of the crossings — which is why they do nothing to a detail in air and something to every other curve on the figure. Materials

The cut-off belongs to the water

An S-N curve's cut-off is the most consequential thing on it: on a category 71 detail under ordinary bridge traffic it deletes ninety per cent of the crossings and leaves two bands doing all the damage. It is a property of steel in air. A crack tip that seawater or de-icing salt can reach has no threshold, no endurance limit and no knee, and the same bridge's life runs from 300 years to 45 depending on which of six defensible calculations is asked.

Bearing damping that shakes the roof harder. The roof's white-noise root-mean-square acceleration as the bearings' damping rises from 3 per cent to 58 per cent, exact and classical, both divided by the exact value at 3 per cent, for the six-storey building. The classical analysis falls all the way, to 0.33. The exact one falls to a minimum of 0.44 at about 28 per cent and then rises, to 0.50 at 58 per cent: past the minimum, every extra per cent of damping at the bearings shakes the top floor harder, while the classical analysis says it is still helping. Dynamics

The top floor the bearings shake

On a building of several storeys, the damping at the isolation bearings is tied less tightly to each higher structural mode than to the one below. It still does more harm in each, because the ground barely reaches those modes on its own. The error the usual analysis throws away gathers in the upper storeys, and past about a third of critical damping at the bearings the roof shakes harder while the analysis says it is still helping. How much damping is best depends on how tall the building is.

A mode that points wherever the asymmetry points. A square floor 24 m on a side, equally stiff in both directions, with a period of 0.80 s. Four copies are drawn on top of each other, each made stiffer by one part in 1,000,000 along a different direction: 0°, 20°, 45°, 70°. The first mode each one returns lies along 90°, 110°, 135°, 160° — at right angles to its stiffening, whatever the size of it — and the two periods differ by one part in 1,000,000. Four structures no instrument could tell apart have first modes pointing four different ways. The floor with no asymmetry at all has no first mode: every direction is one. Dynamics

Two modes that are really a plane

A building equally stiff in both directions has two translational modes with one period, and they are not a pair of shapes but a whole plane of them. The pair an analysis returns is chosen by asymmetries of a millionth, so any result that depends on the pair — a square-root combination, a comparison with measured modes — inherits a choice the building never made. Damping then decides whether the difference can be seen at all.

The modes of five masses joined by springs and held by nothing. Five equal masses joined in a line by equal springs, with nothing holding them to the ground. The first four modes, at zero, 0.62, 1.18, 1.62 times the frequency of one mass on one spring. The first is every mass moving together with no spring stretched at all: a mode at exactly zero frequency, a real solution of the eigenvalue problem, which carries all of the mass and none of the strain. Every other mode has the ends moving against each other, and carries none of the mass under a uniform acceleration. Dynamics

The modes at zero frequency

A structure held by nothing — a span being launched, a segment on a crane, a pontoon — has a mode in which it moves as one body and stretches nothing, at a frequency of exactly zero. That is a real mode, not a glitch in the stiffness matrix. It carries every kilogram of the structure under a uniform acceleration and leaves the flexible modes none at all. A load that is not uniform is a different matter: pushed suddenly from one end, the structure has no static answer to give, only an acceleration with a vibration riding on it.

Two blows on three foundations. The movement of a 150 tonne block struck by a hammer delivering 18 kN·s, twice, 0.75 s apart. On soil at 12.5 Hz with the 47 per cent of damping a half-space radiates, the block moves 0.86 mm and is still before the second blow. On the same soil over shallow rock, with 5 per cent, it moves 1.42 mm and rings for the whole interval. On springs at 4.0 Hz it moves 4.42 mm, and its ringing has not died when the second blow arrives. The peak force passed to the ground is 1.34, 1.32 and 0.42 MN: the heavily damped block and the lightly damped one pass almost the same force. Dynamics

The blow that has no frequency

A forge hammer does not shake its foundation; it strikes it. The transmissibility curve every isolation design is drawn on has nothing to say about a blow, and the rules it teaches mislead. The force a struck block passes to the ground is least at a quarter of critical damping, not the most; five per cent and forty-seven pass almost the same; and the springs that soften every blow can bring the block down to the hammer's own rate and make a train of blows ring four times as high as one.

The rotation a bearing sees is made before it arrives. The end rotation of a 12 m pretensioned beam, 300 mm wide and 700 mm deep, with a 160 mm in-situ slab 1.2 m wide, in 60 per cent humidity, from the prestress's release at three days to thirty years, with sagging positive. Release turns each end 4.8 milliradians upward; creep takes it to 7.9 by day 28, when the beam is set on its bearings. The slab brings it back by 0.9, the surfacing by 0.1, and thirty years of creep take it to 8.1 upward. The band after erection is the imposed load (0.9 down) and a night with the top cooler (0.6 down) above the line, and a sunny day with the top warmer (1.0 up) below it. Every value in the band is below zero: under every load it will carry, the beam's ends still point up, and a level bearing is turned the same way for its whole life. Deflection

The angle made in the casting yard

A bridge bearing is designed for the rotation of the beam it carries, and the rotation is listed as a sum of load, temperature, creep and a tolerance. Followed through the life of a pretensioned beam, the largest term is none of those. It is the upward turn the prestress gives the beam's ends in the casting yard, before any bearing exists, and under every load the beam will ever carry its ends still point up.

The same blow, three seats under the anvil. The movement of the block — the part of a 150 t hammer foundation, 30 t of it the anvil, that lies below the pad — after one blow of 18 kN·s on the anvil, over three periods of the whole foundation on soil (12.5 Hz, damping 0.47). Rigid seat: largest movement 0.86 mm at 16 ms; pad at 4.0 times: largest movement 1.14 mm at 13 ms; pad tuned to the foundation: largest movement 1.18 mm at 35 ms. On the pad at 4.0 times the block rides the anvil's ringing: a ripple at the anvil's own frequency on top of the foundation's swing, whose first crest lands near the swing's peak. On the tuned pad the block receives the blow as one slow push, peaks later and higher, and then goes on ringing long after the rigid seat has settled, because the mode in which anvil and block swing against each other is damped by the pad and hardly at all by the ground. Dynamics

The pad that makes the blow worse

A forge hammer's anvil sits on a pad on its foundation block, and the pad looks like isolation: a spring between the blow and everything below it. For the block it is the opposite. Every pad an anvil can sit on makes the block move more than a rigid seat would, by half again when the pad is tuned near the foundation, and what the pad buys instead is a smaller force under the anvil. The hope that a tuned pad could act as a tuned mass works only against a train of blows, and only at a softness the anvil cannot live with.

The date the joint is cast decides the sign. The moment at the pier after thirty years, for two 12 m pretensioned beams, 300 mm wide and 700 mm deep with a 160 mm slab, made continuous over the pier by a joint cast with the slab, against the beams' age when the joint and slab are cast; sagging positive, with its three parts dashed. Cast at 7 days the joint ends at +320 kN·m; at 28, +214; at 90, +59; at a year, −164. It exceeds the joint's cracking moment of 159 kN·m for any joint cast before about 45 days, and it changes sign at about 130 days. From 7 days to a year the prestress's share falls from +555 to +204, because an old beam has made most of its upward creep before it is joined; the differential shrinkage's grows from −57 to −285, because an old beam has finished its own shrinking and the slab's is then all difference; the dead load's eases from −178 to −83. The first two move the joint the same way as the beams age. Materials

The pier that bends the wrong way

Two precast beams are made continuous over a pier by a joint cast with the deck, and the joint is designed for the hogging moment a continuous beam has there. Thirty years later it is sagging, by more than the moment that cracks its underside, because the beams were still cambering upward when they were joined. Whether that happens is decided by two dates — when the beams were cast and when the joint was — and the deck's shrinkage, which pulls the other way, is not enough to stop it.

One actuator, a tower and a floor. The peak amplification of a mode with 1 per cent damping under velocity feedback of gain 0.10, against the mode's frequency on a logarithmic scale, for control loops whose delay is 10, 25, 50 milliseconds. The dotted line is the mode without control, 50. With 10 ms: 4.6 at 0.2 Hz, 4.5 at 2 Hz and 5.0 at 8 Hz; with 25 ms: 4.6 at 0.2 Hz, 4.6 at 2 Hz and 19.0 at 8 Hz, unstable from 9.8 Hz; with 50 ms: 4.5 at 0.2 Hz, 5.3 at 2 Hz and unstable at 8 Hz, unstable from 4.9 Hz. A delay is a fixed time and a period is not, so the same loop that damps a tall building's sway is too late for a floor. Dynamics

The actuator that arrives late

A tuned mass damps a structure because its force arrives a quarter of a cycle behind the motion. Replace the mass with an actuator told to push against the structure's velocity, and the same quarter-cycle is fatal: the push that was damping becomes stiffness, the stiffness becomes a source of energy, and a gain that would have cut the response tenfold makes the structure vibrate by itself. The delay is a few hundredths of a second, which is nothing to a tower and everything to a floor.

A load on one span moves the other. The change in level along two 100 m spans of stressed ribbon at a sag of 2.00 per cent, carrying 35 kN/m, when 20 kN/m of live load is added to the left-hand span, with a rigid pier (dashed) and with a pier of 200,000 kN/m (solid). With a rigid pier the loaded span sags a further 195 mm and the other does not move. With a pier of 200,000 kN/m the pier top leans 25 mm towards the load, the loaded span sags 358 mm and the unloaded span rises 191 mm; the pier carries 4,953 kN of the 9,440 kN a rigid pier would. Structural form

The pier that carries only the difference

A stressed ribbon continued over a pier pulls on it from both sides, and under its own weight the two pulls cancel. Load one span and they do not: the pier is asked for the difference, nearly ten meganewtons for a crowd on one of two hundred-metre spans. Whether it gives it depends on its stiffness against a number the ribbon supplies itself, and whatever the pier does not carry, the ribbon turns into movement — a third of a metre of extra sag in the loaded span and a fifth of a metre of rise in the empty one.

The same riser, held three ways. The peak bending stress at each floor of a water-filled DN100 riser running the full height of the eight-storey building, under the same record, held three ways. Anchored against rotation at every floor it reaches 131 N/mm², at the lower floors where the drift is largest. Guided at every floor — held in line and free to turn — the same pipe never exceeds 3 N/mm². Guided everywhere but anchored at its base, it carries 77 N/mm² at the base and 21 N/mm² one floor up, and the guided values from there on. Dynamics

The pipe held at every floor

A riser runs the height of a building and is fixed at every floor, so each of its supports moves with a different floor. The floor spectrum prices the pipe's inertia, and for a pipe anchored at every floor the inertia is nearly irrelevant: the drift puts 131 N/mm² into a 100 mm riser at two thirds of a per cent, thirty times its inertia, and passes yield at 200 mm. Guide the same pipe instead of anchoring it and the drift almost vanishes — the pipe then feels only how much the drift changes from one storey to the next.

Three members after a diagonal goes. The forces in three members of the counter-braced truss when the diagonal 9–2, carrying 242 kN, is removed instantaneously, with 2 per cent damping, over one and a half of the damaged truss's first periods (0.57 s); dashed, the static force each settles to. The counter-diagonal 1–10 goes from −112 kN to −354 kN and peaks at −491 kN, 1.57 times its change. The bottom chord 3–4 ends exactly where it started, 750 kN, and on the way peaks at 1,115 kN. The bottom chord 2–3 settles lower, at 556 kN, after a first swing the other way, to 905 kN. Structural form

The factor of two belongs to one mode

A member that fails suddenly hands its force to the structure around it all at once, and the convention is to double the static answer: a load applied suddenly to a spring overshoots to twice its static deflection. A truss is not one spring. Take a diagonal out of a counter-braced truss in an instant and some members swing to three times their change of force, one swings the wrong way first, and a bottom chord whose force does not change at all passes through half as much again as it carries — because every mode overshoots by two, at its own time, and a member is a sum of modes.

What the actuator pushes against decides its limit. The largest feedback gain, as the damping it would add to the bare mode, at which the loop stays stable, against the delay as a fraction of the period, on a logarithmic scale, for a mode of 1.00 per cent damping carrying a tuned mass of 2.00 per cent of its modal mass at Den Hartog's tuning. Pushing against the ground, fed by the structure's velocity: 2.41 at a delay of 0.05, 0.25 at 0.2. Pushing against the tuned mass, fed by the same velocity: 0.0156 at almost no delay, rising to 0.091 at a quarter of a period. Pushing against the tuned mass, fed by the velocity across it: unlimited with no delay, 0.048 at 0.05, 0.0073 at 0.2. Dynamics

The actuator that pushes against the mass

An actuator that damps a structure by feeding back its velocity has to push against something. Against the ground, it is stable up to large gains until a delay of a quarter period removes its damping. Against a tuned mass — the arrangement meant to keep a passive damper underneath — the same feedback goes unstable at a gain of a per cent and a half with no delay at all, makes the structure worse than the passive mass at every gain below that, and drives the mass three or four times as far. What limits it is not when it acts but what it pushes against.

The chimney that locks in most is tuned above the commonest wind. Lock-in cycles a year at the full lock-in amplitude that do the same damage as the whole band (millions), for 1.2 m cylinders of every frequency in hourly mean winds at the top Rayleigh-distributed with scale 5.5 m/s, against the critical speed as a multiple of that scale. Solid, the count through the amplitude envelope; dashed, EN 1991-1-4's closed form 2·T·f₀·ε₀·(Ucr/v0)²·exp(−(Ucr/v0)²) at band widths ε₀ of 0.1 and 0.3. All three peak at a critical speed of √(3/2) = 1.22 times the scale, 6.7 m/s — above the commonest wind (0.71) and the mean (0.89). The envelope is EN's formula with ε₀ = 0.22. The chimney drawn, at 6.0 m/s, collects 4.6 million a year. Dynamics

The breeze that uses up a chimney

A chimney that locks in to vortex shedding at a breeze is usually told to accept the motion and check its fatigue. Counting the cycles a real wind climate delivers turns that into arithmetic, and the arithmetic has two surprises. The chimney that collects the most cycles is not the one tuned to the commonest wind but to one a fifth stronger than the climate's scale, so stiffening a chimney can shorten its life. And damping does not lengthen the life in proportion: it ends the count, all at once, at the damping that puts the largest stress range under the detail's cut-off.

The force climbs back to the elastic one. The peak force of each of 40 drops of a 500 kg weight dropped 1.0 m onto a structure whose stiffness gives it 2.0 mm of static deflection under the weight, onto a structure yielding at 80 kN — half the 160 kN an elastic structure takes (dotted). Perfectly plastic, every drop peaks at 80 kN and the saving holds, at the price of the ratchet. Hardening at 2 per cent, the peak climbs drop by drop: 82 kN at the first, 91 at the fifth, 131 at the 40th; hardening at 5 per cent, the peak climbs drop by drop: 86 kN at the first, 104 at the fifth, 152 at the 40th. A hardening structure ends up carrying almost the elastic force it was made weaker to avoid. Dynamics

The same weight, dropped again

A structure allowed to yield under a falling weight needs only a fraction of the strength an elastic one needs — half of it for a ductility of two and a half — because the energy goes into bending the steel rather than into force. That is the whole saving, and it is spent on the first drop. Drop the same weight again and the structure yields again: a perfectly plastic one adds the same permanent set every time and never stops, and a hardening one stops only when it has stiffened itself back up to nearly the elastic force it was made weaker to avoid, after moving more than half a metre.

Where each check bites. The c shape group with a 5.0 mm throat drawn to scale, loaded 1 mm from its vertical run. Offset from each weld, the use of each point: solid for the static directional check, dashed for fatigue at 2 × 10⁶ cycles, each scaled to its own worst point, which is marked. The static check's worst point is where the force runs most nearly along a weld; the fatigue check's is where it runs most nearly across one. Here the two checks are governed at different points, and a fatigue check made only at the static peak allows a load range 2.25 times the group's. Connections

Strongest across, and first to crack across

A fillet weld pulled across its length is √1.5 stronger than one pulled along it, and every static check of a weld group uses that. In fatigue the same two directions are rated the other way round: the part of the force across the weld is checked against a detail category of 36 and the part along it against 80. The point of a group that governs the static check need not govern the fatigue one, and checking fatigue there can allow more than twice the load range the weld will take.

The cable pays the factor the plateau saved. The force a beam of two 8.0 m spans over the column, 600 mm deep, plastic moment 800 kN·m, its far ends held against rotation and against spreading (plastic collapse load 400 kN) reaches after a sudden loss divided by the load it carries — the dynamic factor — against that load as a share of the plastic collapse load. Below the plateau the beam is a linear spring and the factor is 2. On the bending plateau it falls to 1.18 at 0.90 times the collapse load, because a flat resistance does its work at full strength from the start. Past it the beam becomes a cable, whose resistance is again straight, and the factor climbs back: 1.73 at 1.5 times, 1.88 at 2, 1.97 at 3. Structural form

The cable that pays the factor back

A frame that loses a column carries the floor across the gap first by bending and then, as the beam sags, as a cable. The hope is that a path which stiffens as it deflects needs less than the factor of two a suddenly loaded spring does. On the bending plateau it does — 1.18 at nine tenths of the collapse load. But past one depth of sag the cable is a straight line again, and the factor climbs straight back toward two: 1.73 at one and a half times the collapse load. And the connections are asked for a tenth of a radian on the way.

What the soft layer costs the strong one. For a 40 mm filler whose outer 50 per cent is the soft layer, the least crush force its inner layer must have for the filler to stop a collision at 2.85 m/s — 761 kJ — without running out, against the soft layer's crush stress. The uniform filler that just does it crushes at 31.7 MN; every softer outer layer needs a stronger inner one, and at 1.5 MPa outside the inner layer needs 56.0 MN. The bare concrete's contact at that speed is 35.0 MN (dashed): only an outer layer of at least 5.7 MPa keeps the inner one below it. Dynamics

The filler that cannot be gentle twice

A crushable filler in the gap between two buildings caps a collision at its crush force, but a filler soft enough to make the everyday contacts gentle runs out on the hardest one. Grade it — soft at the face, strong behind — and the soft layer takes the small contacts while the strong layer stops the large. The energy says otherwise. Every kilojoule the soft layer does not absorb, the strong layer must, in less depth: in a 40 mm filler, an outer half at 1.5 MPa needs an inner half at 56 MN, far above the 35 MN of the bare concrete it was meant to improve on.

Out in compression, back in tension. The axial stress in a bare S355 beam (section factor 160 per metre) whose ends are held by the structure around it with 10 per cent of its own axial stiffness, against its temperature, through a compartment fire with an opening factor of 0.04 m^½ and 200 MJ/m² of fuel: heating (solid) and cooling (dashed), with the yield stress at each temperature dotted either side. Heating, the beam pushes against its ends and reaches 134 N/mm² of compression at 628 °C, where the yield stress has fallen to meet it; it then yields, shortening plastically as it follows the falling yield stress up to its peak of 940 °C. Cooling, the thermal expansion comes back out and the plastic shortening does not: the beam passes through zero and ends at 20 °C in 195 N/mm² of tension. Materials

The tension a fire leaves behind

A steel beam held at its ends by the structure around it is pushed into compression as a fire heats it, and yields, because its strength is falling while its expansion is not. When the fire goes out the expansion comes back and the yield does not. Held at a tenth of its own stiffness, a beam that peaked at 134 N/mm² of compression on the way up ends the fire at 195 N/mm² of tension — more than it was ever pushed, arriving hours after the fire was out, and on connections that were designed to carry shear.

A fuse caps the force the strand ever sees. The force in the tendon line of a 2.0 × 8.0 m rocking wall of 400 kN, prestressed to 600 kN, with bars of 400 kN, against the opening of the base under the tendon, loaded to 79 mm and back: the strand alone, 20 kN/mm yielding at 1,370 kN, and the strand with a fuse yielding at 1,000 kN with a stiffness of 500 kN/mm in series, together 19.2 kN/mm and capped at 1,000 kN. The strand alone yields at 39 mm and is slack at upright after any opening past 69 mm; the fused line yields at 21 mm and is slack past 52 mm. In the fused line the strand carries the line's force and never more than 1,000 kN, so it stays elastic and all the plastic stretch, 58 mm at this opening, is in the fuse. Dynamics

The fuse that protects the strand and not the wall

A rocking wall's tendon loses its prestress when it yields, so give it a fuse: a short link in series that yields first and is replaced afterwards. The strand then never passes 1,000 kN and stays elastic. But the fuse caps the restoring moment lower, so under the same 1.5 g pulse the wall rocks to 110 mrad instead of 89, and the line loses all its prestress just as the strand did. A new fuse gives the prestress back; the bars' stretch stays, and the next pulse takes the wall to 134 mrad.

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