Abstract: Disclosed is to a composite material, a structural element comprised of the composite material, an airplane wing spar and their methods of production. Some embodiments of the present invention include composite materials comprised of multiple layers of arrays of metallic bodies separated by layers of non-metallic material, wherein the orientation of metallic bodies in some metallic layers is structurally complementing to the orientation of metallic layers in adjacent metallic layers. Other embodiments of the present invention include structural elements, such as an airplane wing spar, comprised of the composite material.

Abstract: Disclosed is a dynamic fault tree analysis system including a fault tree module associated with a mission critical system (mcs), wherein said fault tree module includes at least one item characterized by an initial probability density function (pdf), at least one threshold value associated with the mcs, a sampling module to transform the initial pdf to a heterogeneous pdf (hpdf), wherein the hpdf includes at least one continuous segment and at least one discrete segment, and wherein transition between segments is at least partially based on the at least one threshold; and a stochastic simulator to determine the probability of an mcs failure condition by analyzing the fault tree module using the heterogeneous pdf.

Abstract: A failure reporting system which includes a plurality of reporting tools for reporting detected failures in a system to be observed is provided. The reporting tools include at least two tools from the group consisting of an audio reporting tool, a visual reporting tool and a text reporting tool. The audio reporting tool includes at lest one microphone, the visual reporting tool includes at lest one video camera and the text reporting tool includes at least one keyboard. The system also includes a control system for activating a selected number from the plurality of reporting tools at a time and an audio recognition unit for discriminating between audible reports and other audible information.