Biodynamic response of shipboard crew to underwater shock is of a major concern to navies. An underwater shock can produce very high accelerations, resulting in severe human injuries aboard a battleship. Protection of human bodies from underwater shock is implemented by installing onboard isolators. In this paper, the optimal underwater shock isolation to protect human bodies is studied. A simple shock-structure-isolator-human interaction model is first constructed. The model incorporates the effect of fluid-structure interaction, biodynamic response of human body, isolator influence. Based on this model, the optimum shock isolation is then formulated. The performance index and estriction are defined. Thirdly, GA (genetic algorithm) is employed to solve the formulated optimization problem. GA is a powerful evolutionary optimization scheme suitable for large-scale and multi-variable optimization problems that are otherwise hard to be solved by conventional methods. Abrief introduction to GA is given in the paper. Finally, the method is applied to an example problem and the limiting performance characteristic is obtained.

In a previous paper (Zong Z, Lam KY. Estimation of complicated disributions using B-spline functions. Structural safety 1998; 20(4): 323-32), we used a linear combination of B-spline functions to approximate complicated distributions. The method works well for large samples. In this paper, we extend the method to small samples. We still use a linear combination of B-spline functions to approximate a complicated probability density function (p.d.f). Strongly in uenced by statistical uctuations, the combination coe-cients (unknown parameters) estimated from a small sample are highly irregular. Useful information is, however, still contained in these irregularities, and likelihood function is used to pool the information. We then introduce smoothness restriction, based on which the so-called smooth prior distribution is con-structed. By combining the sample information (likelihood function) and the smoothness information (smooth prior distribution) in the Bayes' theorem, the in uence of statistical uctuations is effectively removed, and greatly improved estimation, which is close to the true distribution, can be obtained by maximizing the posterior probability. Moreover, an entropy analysis is employed to

Differential quadrature (DQ) is a numerical technique which can produce highly accurate results by using a considerably small number of grid points. When it is applied to dynamic equations, however, DQ may exhibit dynamic numerical instability. The present paper analyzed the sources of dynamic numerical instability through a simple example, and the main finding is that dynamic stability is dominated by the grid points near and on boundaries. Based on this, we propose a variable order approach which is characterized by applying different DQ schemes to the grid points near boundaries and grid points far away from boundaries. Numerical examples of both linear and non-linear dynamic equations show that the variable order approach presented in this paper may greatly improve dynamic stability, producing convincing results.

Underwater shock can produce very high accelerations, resulting in severe human injuries. In this paper, a shock-structure-human interaction model is proposed to study the biodynamic response of a shipboard sitting subject to ship motion induced by underwater shock (ship shock motion) wherein, the human body is modeled using a lumped parameter system with the parameters obtained from dynamic tensile tests. The results obtained from the human model used in this paper and living human drop test are also compared. Numerical results have revealed the characteristics of human response to ship shock motion. The part in direct contact with the structure (like the pelvis) is much more vulnerable than other parts (like the head). The influences of structural damping and stiffness on the peak loads acting on the human body are investigated. Both damping and stiffness have important influences on the pelvis, but have much less influences on other parts. Injury criteria in the literature are also summarized to facilitate injury assessment.