• IHI Corporation

The largest problem encountered when decontaminating and decommissioning nuclear facilities is the increasing costs of processing secondary contamination and liquid waste from the water used for decontamination. NitroJet(R) is expected to become the trump card in decontamination and decommissioning as it will essentially solve this problem with the use of liquid nitrogen.

• IHI Corporation

Society's need for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is rising, and stable LNG terminal operation is becoming increasingly important. A simulator that faithfully replicates a real plant has been developed as a tool for operational training to maintain, improve and pass on plant operating skills, as well as for pretesting and verification when expanding or renewing facilities. In addition, a brand new form of training linked to a power plant simulator has been achieved.

• IHI Ionbond

The Ionbond group is a leading high-quality provider of advanced coatings and coating equipment, with a focus on thin film coating technologies.

• IHI Corporation

As social/industrial infrastructure is aging, demand to realize safe and secure operation at low cost is increasing. To ensure structural health, "monitoring techniques" using various types of sensors have been widely utilized, and methods for automatically sensing/diagnosing the presence of degradation have been widely developed towards practical use. In this article, IHI's unique "SI-F method-based fatigue degradation sensing technique" is introduced together with peripheral techniques.

• IHI Corporation

"Gallium nitride (GaN)" is a next-generation semiconductor, crucial for the performance improvement and spread of optical and power devices. IHI Group is developing a high-temperature, high-pressure furnace aimed at the mass production of GaN. What is the GaN semiconductor? What is the furnace's technology for GaN production?

• UCHIDA Hiroyuki

• SHIRAISHI Koichi, MINAMI Syunichi, KODERA Masanori

The main engine of tugboats is designed for high-power propulsion given the relatively small size of a tugboat's hull, but most of their operation time is spent with low loads. In order to improve the performance of such ships, we came to the conclusion that a composite system was needed and developed a hybrid propulsion system. This system consists of an engine and a propulsion system using a motor and lithium ion batteries and it has achieved the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions reduction target of 20% in comparison with conventional tugboats. The lithium ion batteries can be charged by the power generator and also by plugging in to electric power on land (shore power). In March 2013, Japan's first hybrid tugboat was put into service.

• NAKAJIMA Tomio, SATO Eiichi, TSUDA Hiroshi, SATO Akiyoshi, KAWAI Nobuaki

Research was conducted to apply fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, a kind of optical fiber sensor, to structural health monitoring of solid space rocket composite motor-cases. A new measurement system was developed as a result of the research. The system possesses two light sources. When using multiple fiber ring lasers as the light source, the system can simultaneously measure strains of up to 1% and Acoustic Emission (AE) using multiple FBG sensors. When a broadband light source is used, the system can also measure very fast strains. The system was applied to a pressure test for system evaluations in the development of Epsilon Launch Vehicle.

• TAMURA Masato, OONO Emi, ITOKAZU Ryuunosuke, FUKUSHIMA Hitoshi, KASAI Hidekazu

Co-firing technology that achieves a very high woody biomass-to-coal ratio has been developed. This paper presents the results of experiments on newly developed biomass pulverizers and burners. When used for woody biomass, conventional coal pulverizers can achieve only one-tenth of their coal grinding capacity. Modifications to increase the interior up-flow velocity of pulverizers and to optimize the primary air channel have been carried out. As a result, the grinding capacity for woody biomass has exceeded the coal grinding capacity. A load changing ratio of 1.5-3.0%/min. has also been achieved. This modification to the pulverizer structure can be easily reversed, returning the pulverizer to its original configuration to allow coal grinding if required. The newly developed burners can burn both coal and woody biomass separately.

• WATANABE Osamu, YONEKURA Kazuo, KUBO Seiji

Generally, the design of a shape is expressed by a combination of design parameters such as length and angle, and the optimal shape is investigated according to some optimization method. By using a general parameterization method, the expressibility of the optimal design is constrained by how design parameters are selected, possibly making the optimal design too difficult to find. In this paper, a new shape parameterization method using principal component analysis is proposed so as to express the shape with a greater degree of freedom. Also, an example of shape optimization for film cooling holes in turbine blades using the proposed parameterization method and TDM is introduced.