Parameters studies for rail wear in high-speed railway turnouts by unreplicated saturated factorial design

Rail wear is one of the main reasons for reducing the service life of high-speed railway turnouts in China. The rail wear characteristics of high-speed railway turnouts are influenced by a large number of input parameters of the complex train-turnout system. To reproduce the actual operation conditions of railway turnouts, random distributions of these inputs need to be considered in rail wear simulation. For a given nominal layout of the high-speed railway turnout, 19 input parameters for rail wear simulation in high-speed railway turnouts are investigated based on orthogonal design of experiment. Three dynamic responses(wheel-rail friction work, normal contact force and size of contact patch) are defined as observed values and the significant factors(direction of passage, axle load, running speed, friction coefficient, and wheel and rail profiles) are determined by two unreplicated saturated factorial design methods, including the half-normal probability plot method and Dong 93 method. As part of the associated rail wear simulation, the influence of the wear models and the local elastic deformation on the rail wear was separately investigated. The calculation results for the wear models are quite different, especially for large creep mode. The local elastic deformation has a large effect on the sliding speed and rail wear and needs to be considered in the rail wear simulation.

Unbiased Condition of the Dispersion Effects Estimator in Unreplicated Two-Level Factorial Experiments

This article presents a general form of the estimator for identifying dispersion effects from unreplicated two-level factorial experiments,and shows that the widely used estimators such as the BH,MH,and AMH estimators are all special cases of the proposed one,designated as the G estimator.The unbiased condition of the G estimator is proved,and a lower bound of variance of the G estimator is provided.A simulation based on a realistic design illustrates the variation of the variance and MSE(mean square error) of the G estimator on different coefficients.This estimator may be more flexible and has better performance than other methods such as the BH and MH estimators by appropriately selecting the coefficients.

Identification of a novel resident centrosomal protein

One human autoimmune serum was identified to react with centrosomes by immunofluorescence. We applied the affinity purification of membrane-bound antibody technique and demonstrated that the antibodies present in this antiserum reacted with a 31/29 ku centrosomal antigen. Immunofluorescence showed that this antigen is located at cen-trosome in a cell-cycle independent manner, and thereby it belongs to the family of centrosomal residents. We then utilized this autoimmune serum and antibodies against centrin and gamma-tubulin to investigate changes of centrosome cycle kinetics during premature chromosome condensation (PCC) artificially induced in V79-8 cells. We show here that centrosomal proteins continue to express when cells are syn-chronized at G1/S boundary and S phase by Hydroxyurea (HU). During this tune, the addition of caffeine causes cells with unreplicated genome to go into mitosis, and induces the separation of the replicated centrosomes. These results suggest that the coordination of DNA