Aluminum foil interconnects for solar cell panels

Commercially available sonic welding system and a specially-designed tip bonds aluminum foil interconnects to titanium-silver solar cell contacts

Fire protection for launch facilities using machine vision fire detection

Fire protection of critical space assets, including launch and fueling facilities and manned flight hardware, demands automatic sensors for continuous monitoring, and in certain high-threat areas, fast-reacting automatic suppression systems. Perhaps the most essential characteristic for these fire detection and suppression systems is high reliability; in other words, fire detectors should alarm only on actual fires and not be falsely activated by extraneous sources. Existing types of fire detectors have been greatly improved in the past decade; however, fundamental limitations of their method of operation leaves open a significant possibility of false alarms and restricts their usefulness. At the Civil Engineering Laboratory at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, a new type of fire detector is under development which 'sees' a fire visually, like a human being, and makes a reliable decision based on known visual characteristics of flames. Hardware prototypes of the Machine Vision (MV) Fire Detection System have undergone live fire tests and demonstrated extremely high accuracy in discriminating actual fires from false alarm sources. In fact, this technology promises to virtually eliminate false activations. This detector could be used to monitor fueling facilities, launch towers, clean rooms, and other high-value and high-risk areas. Applications can extend to space station and in-flight shuttle operations as well; fiber optics and remote camera heads enable the system to see around obstructed areas and crew compartments. The capability of the technology to distinguish fires means that fire detection can be provided even during maintenance operations, such as welding

Rare events in networks with internal and external noise

We study rare events in networks with both internal and external noise, and develop a general formalism for analyzing rare events that combines pair-quenched techniques and large-deviation theory. The probability distribution, shape, and time scale of rare events are considered in detail for extinction in the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model as an illustration. We find that when both types of noise are present, there is a crossover region as the network size is increased, where the probability exponent for large deviations no longer increases linearly with the network size. We demonstrate that the form of the crossover depends on whether the endemic state is localized near the epidemic threshold or not

The three different phases in the dynamics of chemical reaction networks and their relationship to cancer

We investigate the catalytic reactions model used in cell modeling. The reaction kinetic is defined through the energies of different species of molecules following random independent distribution. The related statistical physics model has three phases and these three phases emerged in the dynamics: fast dynamics phase, slow dynamic phase and ultra-slow dynamic phase. The phenomenon we found is a rather general, does not depend on the details of the model. We assume as a hypothesis that the transition between these phases (glassiness degrees) is related to cancer. The imbalance in the rate of processes between key aspects of the cell (gene regulation, protein-protein interaction, metabolical networks) creates a change in the fine tuning between these key aspects, affects the logics of the cell and initiates cancer. It is probable that cancer is a change of phase resulting from increased and deregulated metabolic reactions.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, EPL, in pres