The application of tuned liquid column dampers (TLCD) for suppressing excessive lateral pedestrian-induced vibrations of footbridges is investigated experimentally and numerically. In order to study the effectiveness of TLCD, a novel three-degree-of-freedom (DOF) bridge model is constructed in the laboratory of the TU-Institute. A single TLCD is attached to the bridge model to counteract the bridge's fundamental vibration mode. Modal tuning of the TLCD is performed using an analogy to tuned mass damper (TMD). A new excitation device has been developed for simulating the time-periodic contact forces due to walking pedestrians. All vibration tests performed indicate a large reduction of the maximum lateral vibration response amplitude. In order to verify the experimental results, numerical simulations of the laboratory model are performed, which show a good agreement. The application ofTLCD at least doubles the effective modal damping coefficient when compared to the original bridge model.

The aim of this project was to create a ranking of the nursery schools in Wrocław with regard to the quality of the acoustic environment on their premises, using a specially developed evaluation methodology. Each nursery school was rated according to an adopted grading scale on the basis of the noise level distribution on the playground and on the nursery school building facades. Using the grading scale one can classify nursery school premises into twelve categories characterized by different acoustic environment quality, from exceptionally good (< 45 dB) to exceptionally bad (> 70 dB).

The appropriately rescaled data from the acoustic map of Wrocław and the authors' own measurements and simulation analyses were used. The developed methodology was verified by comparing the ratings yielded by it with those determined on the basis of field measurements and simulation studies, carried out for several selected nursery schools. The paper presents the results of an acoustic environment quality assessment carried out, using the developed investigative methodology, for 118 nursery schools located in Wrocław.

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO (techniques use multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver for increasing the channel reliability and enhancing the spectral efficiency of wireless communication system.MIMO Spatial Multiplexing (SM) is a technology that can increase the channel capacity without additional spectral resources. The implementation of MIMO detection techniques become a difficult mission as the computational complexity increases with the number of transmitting antenna and constellation size. So designing detection techniques that can recover transmitted signals from Spatial Multiplexing (SM) MIMO with reduced complexity and high performance is challenging. In this survey, the general model of MIMO communication system is presented in addition to multiple MIMO Spatial Multiplexing (SM) detection techniques. These detection techniques are divided into different categories, such as linear detection, Non-linear detection and tree-search detection. Detailed discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of each detection algorithm are introduced. Hardware implementation of Sphere Decoder (SD) algorithm using VHDL/FPGA is also presented.