A production scheduling problem for hot rolling seamless steel tube at Tianjin Pipe Corporation of China is studied. Considering the complexity of the problem and the acceptable time for solving it, a rule-based heuristic approach is proposed and implemented. The proposed approach is a bottleneck scheduling method and considers simultaneously all production processes in three production units a...

A metal-vapor spectroscopic oven based on the heat-pipe principle has been constructed in which the heated stainless steel wicks are mounted on disks spaced closely compared with their radii and in which the window is a glass spacer ring separating the disks and permitting optical access to the active volume. The device has been successfully operated using both sodium and lithium as the working...