DURABILITY OF RUNNING SHOES WITH EVA AND PU MIDSOLE

Running shoes may play an important role in preventing injuries by absorbing external shock due to ground impact (Cook et al., 1990; Verdejo and Mills, 2004). Shoe age maybe an important factor in running injuries. One prospective study showed that running injury was associated with shoe age (Taunton et al., 2003). In recent years, different types of foam materials have been developed for running shoe midsoles. Two common types of foam materials, Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) and Polyurethane (PU), are now widely used in running shoe midsoles. The purpose of the present study was to examine the durability of running shoes with common types of EVA and PU midsole materials

Measurement of Cosmic-ray Muon-induced Spallation Neutrons in the Aberdeen Tunnel Underground Laboratory

AbstractMuon-induced neutrons are one of the major backgrounds to various underground experiments, such as dark matter searches, low-energy neutrino oscillation experiments and neutrino-less double beta-decay experiments. Previous experiments on the underground production rate of muon-induced neutrons were mostly carried out either at shallow sites or at very deep sites. The Aberdeen Tunnel experiment aims to measure the neutron production rate at a moderate depth of 611 meters water equivalent. Our apparatus comprises of six layers of plastic-scintillator hodoscopes for tracking the incident cosmic-ray muons, and 760 L of gadolinium-doped liquid-scintillator for both neutron production and detection targets. In this paper, we describe the design and the performance of the apparatus. The preliminary result on the measurement of neutron production rate is also presented