This paper presents a review of recent research that has been carried out on the cross-wind effects on road and rail vehicles. After a brief introduction to the issues involved, the risk analysis framework is set out. All risk analysis methods require some knowledge of cross-wind aerodynamic force and moment coefficients, and methods of obtaining these through full scale and wind tunnel testing and through Computational Fluid Dynamics methods are then described. The picture of the flow fields around vehicles that is suggested by these measurements and calculations is then presented, and the steady and the unsteady aerodynamic force characteristics described. The detailed methodology for using this information to predict accident risk is then set out, including details of the vehicle dynamics system models that can be used. Finally potential alleviation methods are described and suggestions made for further works.

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Like with other types of fluid bearings, rotors supported by floating ring bearings may become unstable with increasing speed of rotation due to selfexcited vibrations. In order to study the effects of the nonlinear bearing forces, within this contribution a perfectly balanced symmetric rotor is considered which is supported by two identical floating ring bearings. Here, the bearing forces are modeled by applying the short bearing theory for both fluid films. A linear stability analysis about the static equilibrium position of the rotor shows that for a critical revolution speed the real part of an eigenvalue pair changes its sign. By means of a center manifold reduction it is shown that this destabilization of the steady state is due to a Hopf-bifurcation. Furthermore, the type of this bifurcation is determined as well as the existence and stability of limit-cycles. Notably it is found that depending on the parameters of the floating ring bearing subcritical as well as supercritical bifurcations may occur. Additionally, the analytical results obtained from the center manifold reduction are compared to numerical results by a continuation method. In conclusion, the influences of bearing design parameters on the stability and on the limit-cycles are discussed.

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