Hardening of low-alloy steels for railway transport by a rapidly-moving stream of water

New production processes are considered for hardening railway rolling stock and the upper part of the track structure based on use of intense cooling by a rapidly-moving stream of water.All-Union Institute of Railway Transport (VNIIZhT). Translated from Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov, No. 10, pp. 20–22, October, 1994.     

Reliability Measure Based on Average Loss of Capacity

We present an effective measure of system reliability based on average loss of call capacity that is appropriate for telecommunication hardware. We are led to consider a system consisting of units with many states with appropriately chosen performance effectiveness indices, while all atomic units are binary. In this respect, this effective measure of partial system availability is a variant of customer-centered reliability methodology. We also identify the importance of a new structure called a 'pool' that behaves as a hybrid of series and parallel configurations. We present an algorithm for approximately calculating partial system unavailability, which solves the system decomposition problem for arbitrarily complex highly reliable systems made of hierarchically arranged k-out-of-n sub-structures. The algorithm agrees with our intuition for important special cases and has been programmed into an object oriented software tool. This method has been successfully used for the reliability analysis of Globalstar^TM gateways.     

Analysis of start-up regimes of an induction motor controlled by a thyristor regulator

The start-up regimes of an induction motor controlled by a thyristor voltage regulator are considered. The cases of the fixed stator voltage and different types of loads are analyzed.     

The influence of a thin gold film on the optical spectral characteristics of a porous anodic aluminum-oxide membrane

We have experimentally studied how a thin mesostructured gold film, deposited onto one side of a porous anodic aluminum-oxide membrane, influences its optical spectral characteristics in a 200–900 nm wavelength range. It is established that the gold film only modifies the spectral characteristics of the composite membrane at light wavelengths above 500 nm. The presence of a thin gold film ensures the surface conductivity of membrane on a level of 3.4 × 10⁶ Ω^–1 m^–1, retains optical transparency within 10–20%, leads to the appearance of anomalous dispersion in the long-wavelength part of the transmission spectrum, and reduces the bandgap width from 5.61 eV (in anodic aluminum oxide) to 4.51 eV (in the composite). The obtained anodic aluminum-oxide membranes with thin gold films can be used as transparent conducting electrodes in optoelectronic devices with large light transmitter/receiver active areas.