194 ELECTRONICS & POWER MARCH 1977
Industry
Engineering Services delivers the goods
Engineering Services, an 'inhouse' service
company within the Central Electricity
Generating Board, recently held an exhibition
at the CEGB Headquarters in London. The
exhibition showed how the organisation
operates as an independent company, provid-
ing quality- and production-assurance services
to CEGB departments and external clients.
The organisation employs 600 staff, mostly
qualified engineers, and its work is mainly
concerned with mechanical and electrical plant
for conventional and nuclear power stations.
The expertise available within the organisation,
and on call from the CEGB resources, enables
it also to undertake comprehensive contract
consultancy and supervision services on a
variety of high-technology process plant for the
New braking system for
electric vehicles
The economic viability of battery electric
vehicles of all types from buses to forklift
trucks depends to a considerable extent on the
size, weight and cost of the battery necessary
to achieve the required range and on reducing
maintenance requirements to a minimum. Any
reduction in battery weight will not only
correspondingly reduce its cost, which is a
significant fraction of the total cost of the
vehicle, but will also enable the vehicle to be
more lightly built and materially reduce its
energy consumption per kilometre.
One approach, known as 'regenerative
braking', is to use the traction motor as a
dynamo to feed some of the energy normally
wasted in braking back into the battery. This
will not only reduce the size of battery
necessary, but will also eliminate most of the
wear on the normal brakes, since they will
need to be used only for emergencies and for
parking, and cut down maintenance quite
significantly.
Up to the present time, regenerative braking
systems have required a considerable number
of additional components in the control circuit
and hence have been costly, have necessitated
critical adjustments to provide the requisite
safety margin against miscommutation (which
Ferranti expands Argus range
Two new processors to supplement the highly
successful Argus 700 range have been
announced by Ferranti. At the same time, the
Argus 700 range has been boosted by the
introduction of a bipolar memory which
increases the power of the top of the range
Argus 700S by 50%, a new low-priced m.o.s.
memory, a range of advanced monitors,
including an extremely powerful c.r.t.-based
monitor for use in system commissioning and
improved systems control panels.
The new processors — the Argus 700F and
700G — are claimed to bridge the power gap
between the existing Argus 700E and Argus
700S. The Argus 700F operates with an m.o.s.
memory of 500 ns cycle time; the maximum
memory capacity is 64k 16 bit words. The
Argus 700G has a performance approaching
CEGB construction and repair-and-
maintenance divisions as well as other clients in
the UK and overseas.
In conjunction with British Electricity
International, the organisation recently
reached agreement with the Atomic Energy
Organisation of Iran for the supply of a
complete package of specialist and consultancy
services associated with the 23 GW Iranian
nuclear-power programme. The package will
include supervision of quality control and
inspection at site and at manufacturers,
production assurance to ensure delivery to
programme of plant ordered, and complemen-
tary technical documentation, design and
training facilities.
Engineering Services is run on commercial
would effectively short circuit the battery and
blow the traction fuses) and were not capable
of operation at low road speeds.
Now, as a result of a programme of
development funded jointly by the UK
Department of Industry and Cableform Ltd., a
new system of regenerative braking has been
introduced. This system is claimed to have
advantages over earlier designs in that it is
simple, can be produced at low cost, will
provide regenerative braking almost to a
standstill and requires no critical adjustments.
For many years, the well known Pulsomatic
Mk 10 controller manufactured by Cableform
Ltd. has been fitted to battery electric vehicles
both in the UK and abroad. This system uses a
combination of variable pulse-repetition fre-
quency and variable pulse width to give
minimum ripple over the whole speed range.
The new system, for which patent action is
pending, uses the same driving circuit to
provide smooth and effective braking, and
hence requires only a very small number of
additional components. It can be applied very
cheaply to any battery electric vehicle using a
thyristor controller.
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that of the lower end of the 700S range. Like
the 700S, it supports 256k of memory, 2 or 4
word floating point and virtual addressing.
Both computers utilise the wide range of
microprogrammed input-output processors,
backing stores, peripherals, displays and inter-
face equipment already available.
The new 150 ns bipolar memory upgrades
the Argus 700S so that it can easily achieve
about 1 000 000 instructions per second, a
boost of 50% over the performance of the
same processor with core memory. This
operation complements the ported architec-
ture of the Argus 700S, which allows
independent input-output processors to oper-
ate with time parallel memory access for the
most demanding data rate applcations.
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lines solely on income from clients within the
CEGB and elsewhere. The services offered
cover production assurance, quality assurance,
technical documentation and field services,
with activities incorporated into packages as
consultancy services, plant procurement, site
services and specialist services. The packages
are available individually or as a total service.
At the exhibition, the first certificates of
compliance were awarded to a representative
sample of manufacturing organisations which
have demonstrated that their systems meet the
relevant section of CEGB QA Standard 42
(Quality assurance system requirements
applicable to CEGB contracts).
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Integrated circuits mounted in the 'win-
dows' of a super-8 film, with the terminal
wires functioning both as conductor and
support, can now be supplied by Siemens.
The starting material for the new circuits is
a polyimide ribbon cut and perforated
analogously to a super-8 film. Manufacturer
and user can thus fall back on the drive and
transportation technologies of the film
industry for the production facilities they
require. Before the chips are mounted, the
film surface is coated with copper, tinned
and etched to produce conductors and
terminal points for the chips. The inner
ends of the conductors protrude into the
'windows' of the film to provide both
physical support and electronic bonding.
Once the chips have been inserted, the film
strips are rolled on to reels. About 1000
integrated circuits can be rolled up in this
way on one film. The user of these flat
circuits can cut the circuits individually and
install them directly in his equipment.
Electronically controlled cameras and flat
desktop computers have so far been the
main fields of application, but small
measuring instruments in which optimum
space utilisation is a prime consideration
are now also utilising the new circuits
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