Climate change, global warming, and energy crisis are critical issues to be solved urgently in a global framework. Alternative energy and renewable energy technologies must be quickly developed to be substituted for fossil fuels like oil, gases, and coal. USA, UE, and Japan invested huge budgets to develop biomass renewable energy technology. Their target is to develop a commercial base large-scaled plant. On the other hand, in developing countries, especially in rural areas, people who can access electricity is still less than 70%, To decelerate or prevent global warming and improve electrification in rural areas, a new technology for wood pyrolysis, which requires low manufacturing cost and less maintenance, and of which gases are directly applicable to the gas engine generator, is developed in a laboratory scale. This paper reports the performance of this new plant and effects of several parameters on the performance. It is concluded that the new technology is quite feasible in rural areas, and upgrading of the plant is easily possible.

In the previous experimental work, a new technology system for wood pyrolysis was developed to aim at mitigating climate change, global warming, and energy crisis as well as enhancing low electrification in rural areas in developing countries. The new technology system equipped with a pre-vacuum chamber requires low cost and less maintenance. However, large wood pyrolysis in the pre-vacuum chamber is rather complicated. To obtain a good understanding of the previous experimental results, a numerical analysis taking account of heat-mass transfer and chemical reaction is carried out. Two-step general reaction model is proposed for the numerical analysis. The first stage is volatile and char formation from the wood pieces and the second state is decomposition of the volatile to five species including vapor of tar. In this analysis, chemical formulae of the volatile and the tar are successfully identified hypothetically. The results obtained by this numerical analysis can explain the experimental results reasonably and provide useful information about time evolution of volatile formation, temperature change in pre-vacuum chamber with time, and species mole concentration decomposed from the volatile.

Related to the importance of selectivity to natural fibers that can be used and qualify as one of the raw material composite engineering substitute for Fiber Reinforced Plastics (FRP) or Fiber Reinforced Metals (FRM), one plants that have the potential of fiber and volume growth is very abundant, namely abaca. This research aims to clarify scattering in tensile strength of an abaca single fiber through statistical approach and to search a way of suppression in the scatter with intention that abaca fibers can be used as a raw material for engineering structural components. Tensile test specimens were prepared from fiber samples from two different areas, East Aceh and North Aceh, Indonesia. Specimen gauge length is 25 mm, then as the holder of a fiber made of paper (20mm x 100mm), where the specimen size for fiber tensile test in accordance with JIS standard K-760. Diameter the specimen fibers obtained varied from 0.060 mm to 0.140 mm. The tensile strength of abaca fiber varies in the wide range from 100 MPa to 900 MPa. Coefficient of variation was calculated for East Aceh abaca fibre 0.32 and North Aceh abaca fibre 0.35. It was examined whether Weibull distribution or log-normal distribution could well express scatted experimental results. The results showed that both the distribution types could well express the experimental probabilty density, but log-normal distribution could be more rational for expression of biologial and chronological effects. To reduce scattering of tensile strength, pre-screening concept was proposed.

In order to develop a high-performance radial turbine for wave power conversion, a radial turbine with pitch-controlled guide vanes has been proposed and manufactured in the study. The proposed radial turbine has been investigated experimentally by model testing under steady and sinusoidal flow conditions. Then, the experimental results have been compared with those of the conventional radial turbine for wave power conversion, that is, a radial turbine with fixed guide vanes. As a result, the running characteristics of the proposed radial turbine under steady and sinusoidal flow conditions were clarified and the effect of diffuser setting angle of guide vane on the turbine characteristics was presented. Furthermore, it seems that the proposed radial turbine is much superior to the conventional radial turbine.

Hot-stamped products are widely used for the body-in-white of an automobile as they are lightweight and improve crashworthiness. A hot-stamping process using planar compression was developed to strengthen corners of ultra-high strength parts by local thickening and hardening. In this process, the corners are thickened by compressing the blank in the planar direction with the upper and lower dies while blocking the movement of both edges with stoppers in the latter stage of forming. Thickening of the corners largely heightens the strength of the formed parts. Not only the thickness but also the hardness of the corner was increased by large plastic deformation and die quenching. For a hot hat-shaped part, a 30% increase in thickness and a 530 HV20 hardness around the corners were attained. The bending rigidity and strength of the formed parts thickened by 30% in the corners increased by 25% and 20%, respectively. In addition, the improvements of the part shape accuracy and the sidewall quenchability were obtained.