Memristors: a short review on fundamentals, structures, materials and applications

The paper contains a short literature review on the subject of special type of thin film structures with resistive-switching memory effect. In the literature, such structures are commonly labeled as "memristors". The word "memristor" originates from two words: "memory" and "resistor". For the first time, the memristor was theoretically described in 1971 by Leon Chua as the 4th fundamental passive electronics element with a non-linear current-voltage behavior. The reported area of potential usage of memristor is enormous. It is predicted that the memristor could find application, for example in the domain of nonvolatile random access memory, flash memory, neuromorphic systems and so forth. However, in spite of the fact that plenty of papers have been published in the subject literature to date, the memristor still behaves as a "mysterious" electronic element. It seems that, one of the important reasons that such structures are not yet in practical use, is unsufficient knowledge of physical phenomena determining occurrence of the switching effect. The present paper contains a literature review of available descriptions of theoretical basis of the memristor structures, used materials, structure configurations and discussion about future prospects and limitations

Abrasive Wear Resistance of Ultrafine Ausferritic Ductile Iron Intended for the Manufacture of Gears for Mining Machinery

The purpose of this study was to experimentally determine the abrasion wear properties of ausferritic ductile iron austempered at 250 °C in order to obtain cast iron of class EN-GJS-1400-1. It has been found that such a cast iron grade makes it possible to create structures for material conveyors used for short-distance transport purposes, required to perform in terms of abrasion resistance under extreme conditions. The wear tests addressed in the paper were conducted at a ring-on-ring type of test rig. The test samples were examined under the conditions of slide mating, where the main destructive process was surface microcutting via loose corundum grains. The mass loss of the examined samples was measured as a parameter characteristic of the wear. The volume loss values thus obtained were plotted as a function of initial hardness. Based on these results, it has been found that prolonged heat treatment (of more than 6 h) causes only an insignificant increase in the resistance to abrasive wear