Electrical Contacts: Principles and Applications

"Preface to the Second Edition Since the publication of the first edition of this book there have been some very costly system failures, which could have been prevented with a better knowledge of electrical contact phenomena. I will give two examples. The first is an electrical connector that supplied power to the "Main Fuel Shut-off Valve" in the F-16 fighter airplane. This connector used tin plated pins plugged into a gold plated socket. As will be briefly discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the failure of this combination from fretting corrosion in the aircraft's vibration environment caused the fuel to stop flowing to the jet engines. Several F-16 crashes are attributed to this connector failure with a subsequent cost of over $100 M. In hindsight it is probable that this pin socket combination used extensively in the earlier F-111 airplane resulted in it cancellation. Failure of the connectors most probably resulted in this plane's performance changing from a "terrain following" aircraft to a "terrain impacting" one. The second example occurred in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which began its initial testing in September 2008. Soon after it began to operate, a connection to a 12 MVA transformer failed. This cut power to the main compressors that operated the cryogenic system for cooling the super conducting magnets in two sections. This failure caused extensive wiring damage that cost more than $20 M to repair and set back the initial operation of this expensive experimental system by about nine months"--

Part 1. Contact interface conduction -- part 2. Nonarcing contacts -- part 3. The electric arc and switching device technology -- part 4. Arcing contact materials -- part 5. Sliding electrical contacts -- part 6. Contact data.