Some approaches to corrosion fatigue assessment for structural components of heat-and-power engineering equipment

Some approaches for assessment of corrosion fatigue of materials and structural components for power engineering equipment are presented. Here, the main attention was paid for so-called “non-traditional” damages which are not predicted by normative instructions and which are occurred as result of long time of exploitation or as result of different reflections of operating regimes of equipment. Methods for strength and durability assessment of materials and structural elements are stated on the fracture mechanics basis. Expert assessment of technical state of heat-and-power engineering equipment is considered with taken into account of the actual data of metal properties and operating conditions of equipment

Feasibility of a Small, Rapid Optical-to-IR Response, Next Generation Gamma Ray Burst Mission

We present motivations for and study feasibility of a small, rapid optical to IR response gamma ray burst (GRB) space observatory. By analyzing existing GRB data, we give realistic detection rates for X-ray and optical/IR instruments of modest size under actual flight conditions. Given new capabilities of fast optical/IR response (about 1 s to target) and simultaneous multi-band imaging, such an observatory can have a reasonable event rate, likely leading to new science. Requiring a Swift-like orbit, duty cycle, and observing constraints, a Swift-BAT scaled down to 190 square cm of detector area would still detect and locate about 27 GRB per yr. for a trigger threshold of 6.5 sigma. About 23 percent of X-ray located GRB would be detected optically for a 10 cm diameter instrument (about 6 per yr. for the 6.5 sigma X-ray trigger).Comment: Elaborated text version of a poster presented at 2012 Malaga/Marbella symposiu

Three natural mechanical systems on Stiefel varieties

We consider integrable generalizations of the spherical pendulum system to the Stiefel variety $V(n,r)=SO(n)/SO(n-r)$ for a certain metric. For the case of V(n,2) an alternative integrable model of the pendulum is presented. We also describe a system on the Stiefel variety with a four-degree potential. The latter has invariant relations on $T^*V(n,r)$ which provide the complete integrability of the flow reduced on the oriented Grassmannian variety $G^+(n,r)=SO(n)/SO(r)\times SO(n-r)$.Comment: 14 page