Terms starting with A

The workhorse high-strength structural bolt: heavy hex, quenched and tempered, 120 ksi minimum tensile.

The mid-tier North American architectural coating spec, requiring five years of Florida exposure with limited fade.

US highway specification for geotextiles that sets required properties by application and survivability class.

A deliberately soft coating that rotating blade tips cut into, setting a tight seal clearance.

How well a refractory stands up to scouring by moving solids, usually measured by the ASTM C704 test.

Wear caused by hard particles or hard surface peaks plowing and cutting through a softer surface.

The energy deposited by ionising radiation per unit mass of material, measured in gray.

How much liquid a nonwoven takes up and how fast, usually reported as grams per gram and absorption time.

Asphalt cement: the binder itself, and in pavement design talk, shorthand for the asphalt concrete layer.

Ratio of life under normal use conditions to life under a harsher test condition, used to turn test hours into field time.

An admixture that speeds up setting and early strength gain, mostly used in cold weather.

Accepting or rejecting a whole lot based on inspecting a random sample from it against a predefined plan.

A tank in the suction line that catches liquid refrigerant before it can reach and damage the compressor.

How close a measured value comes to the true value, a qualitative idea rather than a reported number.

Air changes per hour: how many times a space's full air volume is replaced in one hour.

Acute inside angle in copper artwork where etchant can pool and over-etch, a classic DFM flag. Shop talk

The dark area behind an object in a side-scan image where the object blocked sound from reaching the seabed.

The process by which neutrons make stable materials radioactive, creating isotopes such as cobalt-60.

A liquid applied to one surface to speed or start the cure of an adhesive placed on the other.

The part of electrical power that does real work, averaged over each cycle and measured in watts.

The powered device that opens, closes or positions a valve using air, hydraulic oil or an electric motor.

Acoustic Doppler current profiler: an instrument that measures current speed and direction at many depths at once.

The radial height of a gear tooth above the pitch circle, normally one module for a standard tooth.

Pre-blended mix of performance chemicals that a blender adds to base oil to make a finished lubricant.

Each of the parts in a bonded joint; the surface the adhesive has to grip.

A chemical, often a silane, that links an adhesive to a surface by bonding to both.

A break at the interface between adhesive and part, leaving one surface clean or nearly clean.

A bond test break at the coating-substrate interface, meaning the coating let go of the base metal.

A sealant pulling cleanly away from one joint face, leaving the substrate bare.

Wear where touching asperities weld together and tear, moving metal from one surface to the other.

Joke name for an adjustable wrench, after how often it ends up being used to hit things. Shop talk

Changing an instrument so its readings move closer to the correct values, a step separate from calibration.

Acquisition distribution layer: the lofty layer under a diaper topsheet that takes in liquid and spreads it to the core.

A product dosed into a concrete batch, usually by the ounce, to change its flow, set time, air or durability.

Air bubbles under the hull or across the transducer face that block sound and cause lost pings.

Alkaline earth silicate wool, a body-soluble high-temperature fiber used in place of ceramic fiber.

A double high water or double low water, where the tide peaks or bottoms out twice in quick succession.

Describes powder made by spray drying fine particles into balls, then sintering them to give them strength.

The sand, gravel and crushed stone that make up 60 to 75 percent of a concrete mix by volume.

Describing a tape or adhesive with high tack and strong immediate grab that is hard to reposition. Shop talk

Holding a solution-treated alloy at room or moderate temperature so fine particles form and strengthen it.

Forced movement of quenchant around parts by pumps, propellers or nozzles to speed up and even out cooling.

A grade that sets how accurate a gear's teeth must be, on either the Q-number or the A-number scale.

Air handling unit: the cabinet of fans, coils, filters and dampers that conditions and moves air through a building's ducts.

Buoys, beacons, lights and electronic marks placed to guide vessels and warn of hazards.

Pressure test of a dual-track fusion seam in which the gap between the two welds is pumped up and watched for loss.

Shop term for a tool moving at feed rate through empty space, wasting cycle time. Shop talk

Deliberately building billions of microscopic air bubbles into concrete so it survives freezing and thawing.

Carbon monoxide in flue gas corrected to zero excess oxygen, so dilution with air cannot hide a CO problem.

Describes steels with enough alloy to harden fully when cooled in still air or gas instead of a liquid.

Nozzle that blows compressed air at the edge of a lapped seam to find unbonded spots in thin, flexible liners.

A sealed pressure vessel used at the truck to measure the air content of fresh concrete.

Rate of air flow through a fabric at a fixed pressure difference, reported per unit area.

A hydronic fitting that pulls air bubbles out of circulating water and sends them out through an automatic vent.

The small pockets of air between binder-coated aggregate in compacted mix, given as a percent of total volume.

Web formed by suspending short fibers, mostly fluff pulp with some binder fiber, in air and depositing them on a wire.

As low as reasonably achievable: the principle of keeping doses as low as practical, not just below limits.

Airborne lidar bathymetry: depth measured from an aircraft with green laser pulses that pass through the water.

A cab safety device that applies the brakes if the engineer stops moving the controls or pressing its reset.

Situation in a fractional design where two or more effects leave identical patterns in the data and cannot be told apart.

Damage from potassium and sodium compounds that react with alumina-silica refractories and swell them apart.

Steel rod threaded along its whole length, used to hang conduit, strut and fixtures from the structure. Shop talk

Shop name for threaded rod: steel bar threaded end to end, cut to length for hangers, anchors and long studs. Shop talk

Shop name for an L-shaped hex key used to drive socket head cap screws and set screws. Shop talk

A pattern of surface cracks on aged sealant or asphalt that looks like alligator skin.

Heat-treat slang for the heat-resistant baskets, trays, grids and fixtures that carry parts through the furnace. Shop talk

Aluminum oxide blended with titanium dioxide, a tough general-purpose ceramic wear coating.

Waxy, greasy film on curing amine epoxies in cold or damp conditions that blocks adhesion of the next coat.

A point in the sea where a tidal constituent has zero range and around which its high water rotates.

A one-part liquid that stays fluid in air but cures when sealed between metal surfaces away from oxygen.

Microscope study of wear particles pulled from oil by a magnet, used to identify how a machine is wearing.

Metal or ceramic tie welded to the shell to hold a monolithic lining in place.

Peak-to-valley roughness that blasting cuts into steel so a coating can grip, given in mils or microns.

The peak-to-valley roughness that blasting cuts into steel, giving the coating something to grip.

The peak-and-valley roughness grit blasting leaves on a surface, which the coating locks onto.

Trench along the top of a slope where the edge of a geosynthetic is buried to hold it in place.

Fine threads of hot melt that string off the nozzle and drift across machines and products. Shop talk

Joking name for electricity itself, especially when it escapes as sparks, smoke or a shock. Shop talk

Tool-teardown slang for electricity, the invisible little creatures that bite when you get careless. Shop talk

Heating metal and cooling it slowly to soften it, relieve stress and make it easier to machine or form.

Ring of pad copper left around a drilled hole, which must stay wide enough after the drill wanders.

Electrode where oxidation happens and metal dissolves; in CP, the hardware installed to discharge current.

Analysis of variance: splitting total variation into parts from each factor and from error, then testing which parts are real.

Anti-contamination clothing: the coveralls, hoods, gloves and overshoes worn to keep contamination off workers. Shop talk

A grease loaded with metal or ceramic particles that stops threads from galling, rusting or bonding under heat.

Additive that slows the chemical aging of oil by intercepting the radicals and peroxides that drive oxidation.

Automated optical inspection: camera system that checks boards for missing, shifted or badly soldered parts.

Apparent opening size: an index of the largest openings in a geotextile, given as a US sieve number or in millimeters.

Angled Physical Contact: a singlemode connector polish with an 8 degree angle that sends reflections into the cladding.

Open space between the ribs of a geogrid or between the strands of a woven geotextile.

Shape and size used to draw or flash a feature in Gerber data, named for the opening in a photoplotter's aperture wheel.

Making a regular pattern of holes in a nonwoven, mainly so liquid passes through topsheets faster.

Share of a refractory's volume made up of open pores that liquids and gases can penetrate.

Product of RMS voltage and RMS current, the figure transformers, generators and UPS units are rated on.

Electrician in training who works under a journeyman while logging set hours of job experience and school.

The temperature gap between a fluid leaving a heat exchanger and the fluid or condition it is being brought toward.

Acceptable quality level: the defect rate a sampling plan is built to pass most of the time, the good end of its OC curve.

Shop name for the immersion temperature control that fires and limits a hot water boiler. Shop talk

Antireflection coating: thin dielectric layers that cut surface reflections from about 4 percent to a fraction of a percent.

The yellow strength yarn inside fiber cables that takes the pulling load so the glass does not.

A DC arc pushed sideways off the joint by unbalanced magnetic fields in the work, making the bead wander.

Explosive release of heat, light and pressure when an electric arc forms through air between energised parts.

Removing metal with a carbon electrode arc and a jet of compressed air, used to back gouge and dig out defects.

A spot where the arc touched base metal outside the weld, leaving a small melted or hardened scar.

Tapered brick whose thickness narrows across its width, used to turn thin arches and rings.

Periodic pressure bursts in a diode ion pump as buried argon is released again from the cathodes.

Shop joke for doing a job by muscle power alone, with no power feed, hoist or machine help. Shop talk

A physical object that embodies a known value of a quantity, such as a mass, gauge block or standard resistor.

Image of each board layer used to make the phototools for fabrication, and by extension the layer data itself.

Calibration data recorded on an instrument as received, before any adjustment or repair is made.

Calibration data recorded after adjustment or repair, showing the condition the instrument returns to service in.

Describes a coating straight from the gun, before any grinding, machining, sealing or heat treatment.

Amplified Spontaneous Emission: random spontaneous photons amplified in a gain medium, a broadband noise background.

Mineral residue left after burning a paper sample, used to estimate filler and coating pigment content.

Ratio of a board's thickness to the diameter of a drilled hole, which limits how well the hole can be plated.

One of the microscopic peaks on a machined surface that makes first contact when the film gets too thin.

Height of the raised texture on a textured geomembrane, measured from the core of the sheet.

The black, sticky petroleum cement that glues the aggregate together in an asphalt mix.

Asphalt binder broken into tiny droplets and suspended in water with an emulsifier so it can be sprayed cool.

Alkali-silica reaction, a slow internal reaction between cement alkalis and certain aggregates that cracks concrete.

The part of the water level caused only by the gravitational effects of the Moon and Sun.

Shop phrase meaning a load has reached its setpoint temperature, so its soak time can start counting. Shop talk

Said of a turbo pump that has finished spinning up and reached its normal rotational speed. Shop talk

Shop clipping of atmospheric pressure, used for a chamber that is vented and open to air. Shop talk

The gradual loss of optical power as light travels along a fiber, expressed in decibels.

Fiber loss per unit length, in dB/km, which sets how much a given length of glass will lose.

Quenching steel into a salt bath above Ms and holding it until the austenite fully transforms to bainite.

The face-centered cubic form of iron that dissolves carbon and must form before steel can be hardened.

Heating steel above its upper critical temperature and holding it until the structure becomes austenite.

Automatic closing of a breaker shortly after a fault trip, restoring supply when the fault was only transient.

Correlation between successive values in a time series, which breaks the independence that standard control charts assume.

An instrument that measures ultrashort pulse duration by overlapping a pulse with a delayed copy of itself.

Happening automatically by some hidden process nobody fully understands or wants to explain. Shop talk

Antiwear: additives or oils that build protective films to cut wear under moderate boundary contact.

Alumina-zirconia-silica fused-cast refractory, the standard glass-contact material in glass melting furnaces.