• The emergence of stress corrosion cracking is one of the most important issues from the viewpoint of aging management and maintenance of nuclear power plants. There is a large discrepancy between stress corrosion cracking and other cracks such as fatigue cracks from the viewpoint of nondestructive testing and evaluations, which requires suitable specimens containing stress corrosion cracking for the development of nondestructive testing and evaluation techniques and also for personnel training. However, artificially introducing stress corrosion cracking needs large cost and long time. Furthermore, several studies have pointed out that such articial stress corrosion cracking is not always similar to natural ones. On the basis of the background above, we develop a method to fabricate "imitative" stress corrosion cracking specimens using diffusion bonding.

The method enables one to introduce a region whose response is almost identical to actual stress corrosion cracking from the viewpoint of nondestructive testing. Whereas the dimension of the region is accurately controllable, the method requires much less cost and time comparing the conventional ones using corrosive environment. Patent is already applied for.

• One of our major research focuses is to design the novel drug nanoparticles, so called “Nano-prodrugs”, and to apply them as anticancer drugs or eye drops with excellent delivery efficiency. Nano-prodrugs are constructed by synthetic prodrugs molecules which contains poorly water-soluble substituent. They could be fabricated to nanoparticles with 100 nm or less in size by our reprecipitation technique, which has been used to create organic nanomaterials. We are aiming at practical application of our Nano-prodrugs in the near future.

Our reprecipitation technique for fabricating organic nanomaterials is a versatile technique that can be applied to various organic molecules as well as drug compounds. We hope to conduct collaborative research with a willing company on controlling and evaluating properties of the organic nanoparticles.

• Nanoparticles and/or fine particles to be used for functional materials, such as semiconductor, photocatalysts, dielectric and/or piezoelectric materials, cosmetics, catalysts, etc., has been synthesized in liquid-phase. Their size, shape, composition, and structure have been <strong>precisely controlled</strong> along an expected usage. <strong>Tailor-made synthesis method</strong> has been provided for nanoparticles and/or fine particles the companies wish to use.

Until now, we have been supplying nanoparticles and/or fine particles of ITO (Indium Tin Oxides) as TCO, Bi based or Nb based particles for lead-free piezoelectric ceramics, perovskite-based oxides for dielectric materials etc. The gel-sol method as the main synthesis method for uniform particles makes the production cost reduced.