Metal grid technologies for flexible transparent conductors in large-area optoelectronics

Mechanically flexible optoelectronic devices such as flexible displays, touch-screens, wearable electronics and solar cells are attracting significant commercial interest. In these devices, a transparent conductor is an essential element that delivers or collects the electrical current to the active material while it allows light to enter or exit from the device. The transparent conductor is composed of a transparent conductive film and a metallic grid providing electrical conduction over the large area. In this article, we review the established processes used by the industry as well as emerging solution-based methods for processing metal grids. Furthermore, we review the issues and potentials of these emerging processes facing for large-area deployment. In the final section, we evaluate three applications of flexible transparent conductors in: perovskite-based solar cells, organic light emitting diodes and electrochromic windows.     

Getting Ahead of the Arms Race: Hothousing the Coevolution of VirusTotal with a Packer

Malware detection is in a coevolutionary arms race where the attackers and defenders are constantly seeking advantage. This arms race is asymmetric: detection is harder and more expensive than evasion. White hats must be conservative to avoid false positives when searching for malicious behaviour. We seek to redress this imbalance. Most of the time, black hats need only make incremental changes to evade them. On occasion, white hats make a disruptive move and find a new technique that forces black hats to work harder. Examples include system calls, signatures and machine learning. We present a method, called Hothouse, that combines simulation and search to accelerate the white hat’s ability to counter the black hat’s incremental moves, thereby forcing black hats to perform disruptive moves more often. To realise Hothouse, we evolve EEE, an entropy-based polymorphic packer for Windows executables. Playing the role of a black hat, EEE uses evolutionary computation to disrupt the creation of malware signatures. We enter EEE into the detection arms race with VirusTotal, the most prominent cloud service for running anti-virus tools on software. During our 6 month study, we continually improved EEE in response to VirusTotal, eventually learning a packer that produces packed malware whose evasiveness goes from an initial 51.8% median to 19.6%. We report both how well VirusTotal learns to detect EEE-packed binaries and how well VirusTotal forgets in order to reduce false positives. VirusTotal’s tools learn and forget fast, actually in about 3 days. We also show where VirusTotal focuses its detection efforts, by analysing EEE’s variants.     

Conformationally Selective Synthesis of Mononitrocalix[4]arene in Cone or Partial Cone

Nitro‐substituted calixarenes in a cone and a partial cone conformation were prepared selectively using distinct synthetic routes. The selective nitration of tris‐ or penta‐substituted phenols of calix[4]arene or calix[6]arene provided mononitrocalix[n ]arenes (n  =  4, 6). Subsequent addition of ethylene glycol (EG) moieties to mononitrocalix[4]arene provided tetraEGylcalix[4]arene in locked partial cone conformation. By an alternative route – initial addition of EG moieties to the non‐derivatized calix[4]arene followed by the uncontrolled nitration – provided mononitro‐ and dinitro‐tetraEGylcalix[4]arenes locked in the cone conformation. These nitrocalix[4]arenes with locked cone or partial cone conformation are useful building blocks for further assembly of supramolecular systems, especially in the area of material sciences.     

Redundant actuators to achieve minimal vibration trajectory tracking of flexible multibodies: Theory and application

We address the problem of inverse dynamics for flexible multibodies, which arises, in trajectory tracking control of flexible multibodies such as space manipulators and articulated flexible structures. Previous research has resolved this trajectory tracking problem by computing the system inputs for feedforward control of actuators at the joints. Recently, the use of distributed actuators like electro-strictive actuators in flexible structures has introduced a new dimension to this trajectory tracking problem. In this paper we optimally utilize such actuators to aid joint actuators for tracking control, and introduce a new inverse dynamics scheme for simultaneously (1) tracking a prescribed trajectory and (2) minimizing ensuing elastic deflections. We apply this scheme for trajectory tracking of a two-link two-joint planar manipulator with joint motors and distributed electro-strictive actuators. Experimental results are presented to contrast our new scheme with other existing methods.     

万有引力场中挠性联结双体系统的稳定性与分岔

本文讨论受万有引力矩作用沿圆轨道运动的挠性联结双体系统的平面天平动。讨论其相对轨道坐标系的可能平衡状态。利用Ｌｉａｐｕｎｏｖ直接法分析各平衡状态的稳定性。分析表明，当刚度系数足够小时，平衡状态呆产生分岔和稳定性突变。利用参数空间对系统的全局运动性态作出定性的描述。     

Heat release and structural collapse of flexible polyurethane foam

Flexible polyurethane foam used in upholstered furniture remains one of the major fire hazards to date. The heat release rate of burning items made of foam depends strongly on the foam's physical behavior, notably its collapse to a burning liquid that can result in a pool fire. In this contribution, the cone calorimeter was used to study the physical processes and to determine their influence on foam combustion over a range of external heat fluxes. The initial stage of foam collapse can be described as the propagation of a liquid pyrolysis layer through the foam sample. The rate of propagation of the liquid layer was found to depend strongly on the convective heat transfer from the flame, which simultaneously defined and depended on the sample shape. The effective heat of combustion during foam collapse and pool fire was matched to the heat release potential of the components of the foam formulation to deduce which are consumed. The proposed analysis can serve to clarify the mechanism of flame retardant action, as demonstrated for a commercial brominated-phosphorous compound.     

Synthesis,characterization, electrochemical behaviour and X-ray crystal structures of nickel(II) complexes with a N2O4 donor set macrocyclic Schiff base ligand

Two nickel(II) complexes of [1 + 1] macrocyclic Schiff base ligand (L) have been prepared by cyclocondensation reactions between 1,3-diamino-2-propanol and 2-[3-(2-formylphenoxy)-2-hydroxypropoxy] benzaldehyde, using NiX₂ (X = Br, and I) salts as template agents, and characterized by elemental analyses, IR, molar conductivity and electronic spectra in both solid and solution states. The single-crystal X-ray diffractions of the complexes are also reported that contain nickel(II) ion in a distorted octahedral geometry coordination of N₂O₃X (X = Br, I and NO₃). In all complexes the ligand behaves as a pentadentate ligand. Cyclic voltammetric studies of nickel(II) complexes indicate a quasi-reversible redox wave in the negative potential range.     

Development of novel flexible black silicon

We report a new type of black silicon: flexible black silicon. A silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer is irradiated by automatically scanning a femtosecond laser and then split by etching out the SOI silica middle layer. Large-area, uniform micro spikes on the surface of a very thin flexible silicon layer are obtained. The black silicon shows good flexibility and optical properties. The absorption spectrum of the flexible black silicon is as high as 97% in the visible and insensitive to the change of the incident angle of the light, which makes it a potential good candidate as an absorber for the solar-thermo generator.     

A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the multi-objective flexible job-shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities

This paper presents a novel discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm for solving the multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities. Performance criteria considered are the maximum completion time so called makespan, the total workload of machines and the workload of the critical machine. Unlike the original ABC algorithm, the proposed DABC algorithm presents a unique solution representation where a food source is represented by two discrete vectors and tabu search (TS) is applied to each food source to generate neighboring food sources for the employed bees, onlooker bees, and scout bees. An efficient initialization scheme is introduced to construct the initial population with a certain level of quality and diversity. A self-adaptive strategy is adopted to enable the DABC algorithm with learning ability for producing neighboring solutions in different promising regions whereas an external Pareto archive set is designed to record the non-dominated solutions found so far. Furthermore, a novel decoding method is also presented to tackle maintenance activities in schedules generated. The proposed DABC algorithm is tested on a set of the well-known benchmark instances from the existing literature. Through a detailed analysis of experimental results, the highly effective and efficient performance of the proposed DABC algorithm is shown against the best performing algorithms from the literature.     

Flexible capacity strategy with multiple market periods under demand uncertainty and investment constraint

We establish a flexible capacity strategy model with multiple market periods under demand uncertainty and investment constraints. In the model, a firm makes its capacity decision under a financial budget constraint at the beginning of the planning horizon which embraces n market periods. In each market period, the firm goes through three decision-making stages: the safety production stage, the additional production stage and the optimal sales stage. We formulate the problem and obtain the optimal capacity, the optimal safety production, the optimal additional production and the optimal sales of each market period under different situations. We find that there are two thresholds for the unit capacity cost. When the capacity cost is very low, the optimal capacity is determined by its financial budget; when the capacity cost is very high, the firm keeps its optimal capacity at its safety production level; and when the cost is in between of the two thresholds, the optimal capacity is determined by the capacity cost, the number of market periods and the unit cost of additional production. Further, we explore the endogenous safety production level. We verify the conditions under which the firm has different optimal safety production levels. Finally, we prove that the firm can benefit from the investment only when the designed planning horizon is longer than a threshold. Moreover, we also derive the formulae for the above three thresholds.