A portable thermal lens spectrometer with a precise focusing system was developed. Astigmatism of the reflected excitation beam from the microchip was used for depth direction focusing. For width direction focusing, the scattering effect of the transmitted probe beam by a microchannel edge was used. The focusing system was evaluated with a 250 microm wide x 50 microm deep microchannel. Focusing resolutions for depth and width directions were 1 and 10 microm, respectively. The repeatability of the thermal lens signal (40 microM xylenecyanol solution) was proved to be approximately 1% coefficient of variance when using these focusing methods. The limit of detection for a xylenecyanol solution was 30 nM, and the absorbance was 4.7 x 10(-6) AU. The sensitivity was 20-100 times higher than that obtained by spectrophotometry. In consequence, a practical thermal lens spectrometer was realized.

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An automatic coking control system is developed and commercialized. The system is to aim at the stabilization and optimization of coke-oven operation. For this purpose, a control algorithm has been developed to calculate an optimum heat pattern based on optimum control theory, and the experimentation has been run to test the algorithm by using a temperature field simulator. The system has already been installed at coke-oven batteries of NIPPON STEEL'S works.

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