Importance of nuclear generation in the struggles to reduce CO2 emission at Kansai Electric Power Co.

It has been pointed out in recent years that the potential impacts of global warming has been becoming more and more serious because of the rapid increase of anthropogenic CO₂ emission.

Japan's annual CO₂ emissions (fiscal 1994) amounted to 343 million tons of carbon. Although CO₂ emissions caused by fossil-fuel power generation accounted for 29.4% of total, on a sector basis, those directly from the energy conversion sector accounted for only 7.7%. Most CO₂ emissions (21.7% of total) resulted from electric power use in the industrial, commercial and domestic sectors. Thus, the reduction of CO₂ emissions caused by the use of electricity is a nationwide subject.

Understanding that both supply side and demand side approaches are necessary, Kansai Electric has been deploying “New ERA Strategy” as a comprehensive strategy to seek a potential for CO₂ reduction more broadly and deeply. Among a number of action items are the promotion of nuclear power generation, and improvement of overall energy efficiency, besides such demand side measures as leveling off the peak load.

The effectiveness of action items of the New ERA Strategy was evaluated in terms of CO₂ reduction. As a result, estimated CO₂ reduction related to nuclear power amounted to 88% of the total for fiscal 1995 in comparison with 1990, and that expected in 2000 is 84%. These results reconfirm that nuclear power is always the key to practical CO₂ reduction at present and in the future.

Comparison with candidate technology alternatives revealed that photovoltaic power generation needed 7 times greater rated capacity and 280 times larger area than nuclear power, so it is not realistic as a central power station alternative. The comparison also clarified that if wind power stations were constructed at all feasible sites in the Kansai region, they would not be a viable alternative to a single nuclear unit from CO₂ reduction viewpoint.     

Growth of Al2O3 whiskers by vapour-phase reactions

Needle-like or wool-like Al₂O₃ whiskers can be grown on a substrate by the hydrolysis of aluminium fluoride vapour. Effects of the growth conditions on the morphology of the crystals and growth processes of the whisker were investigated, and the optimum growth condition of whiskers was examined. Adequate vapour pressure conditions of the reactant gases for the growth of the wool-like whisker were found to be . Aluminium oxyfluoride was assumed to be the most probable intermediate species for the growth of Al₂O₃ whiskers. A variety of crystal morphologies are also shown and described with respect to the experimental conditions.     

PTCR Characteristics in Barium Titanate Ceramics with Curie Points Between 60° and 360°C

PTCR characteristics in porous semiconducting barium titanate ceramics with Curie points from 60° to 360°C were investigated. The magnitude of the PTCR effect in these cerumics decreases self-onsistently with increasing Curie point within this temperature range. A PTCR efSect of more than 4 orders of magnitude was ahserved, for a Ba_0.44Pb_0.6TiO₃ ceramic with a Curie point of 360°C .     

Domain Adaptation for Structured Regression

Discriminative regression models have proved effective for many vision applications (here we focus on 3D full-body and head pose estimation from image and depth data). However, dataset bias is common and is able to significantly degrade the performance of a trained model on target test sets. As we show, covariate shift, a form of unsupervised domain adaptation (USDA), can be used to address certain biases in this setting, but is unable to deal with more severe structural biases in the data. We propose an effective and efficient semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) approach for addressing such more severe biases in the data. Proposed SSDA is a generalization of USDA, that is able to effectively leverage labeled data in the target domain when available. Our method amounts to projecting input features into a higher dimensional space (by construction well suited for domain adaptation) and estimating weights for the training samples based on the ratio of test and train marginals in that space. The resulting augmented weighted samples can then be used to learn a model of choice, alleviating the problems of bias in the data; as an example, we introduce SSDA twin Gaussian process regression (SSDA-TGP) model. With this model we also address the issue of data sharing, where we are able to leverage samples from certain activities (e.g., walking, jogging) to improve predictive performance on very different activities (e.g., boxing). In addition, we analyze the relationship between domain similarity and effectiveness of proposed USDA versus SSDA methods. Moreover, we propose a computationally efficient alternative to TGP (Bo and Sminchisescu 2010), and it’s variants, called the direct TGP. We show that our model outperforms a number of baselines, on two public datasets: HumanEva and ETH Face Pose Range Image Dataset. We can also achieve 8–15 times speedup in computation time, over the traditional formulation of TGP, using the proposed direct formulation, with little to no loss in performance.     

Development of large-scale stacked-type electrostatic actuators for use as artificial muscles

Electrostatic actuators have the advantages of light weight, flexibility, and high energy efficiency, which make them suitable for use as artificial muscles. However, a traditional electrostatic actuator cannot generate long strokes and a high force density at the same time because such actuator would excessively widen the gap between the electrodes because of its structure. This paper presents a newly developed large-scale stacked-type electrostatic actuator (LSEA) intended for use as an artificial muscle for robots. LSEA is a multi-stacked electrostatic actuator that can be linearly contracted by the application of a voltage. It has a unique structure that prevents overextension of the gap between the electrodes. It can therefore generate a large force. The spring characteristics and the relationship between the contractive force and the stroke were experimentally determined. The findings showed that LSEA prevents the overextension of the gap between the electrodes and has a high contraction ratio that is equivalent to that of a mammalian skeletal muscle.     

Fate of the chlorine and fluorine in a sub-bituminous coal during pyrolysis and gasification

The fate of the chlorine and fluorine present in a sub-bituminous coal from Indonesia during pyrolysis and gasification has been studied with fixed and entrained bed reactors. The rate profile for HCl evolved in the temperature programmed pyrolysis exhibits the main and shoulder peaks at 480 and 600 °C, respectively. Model experiments and subsequent Cl 2p XPS measurements show that HCl reacts with metal impurities and carbon active sites at 500 °C to be retained as inorganic and organic chlorine forms, from which HCl evolves again at elevated temperatures. It is suggested that the HCl observed in the coal pyrolysis may originate from the above-mentioned chlorine functionalities formed by secondary reactions involving the nascent char. In the CO₂ gasification of the 900 °C char at 1000 °C and 2.5 MPa, any measurable amounts of HCl and HF could not be detected even at a high conversion of 75 wt% (daf), suggesting the accumulation of these halogens in the residual char. When the coal is injected into an O₂-blown, entrained bed gasifier at 1200-1400 °C under 2.6 MPa, the partial oxidation proceeds to a larger extent at a higher O₂/coal ratio, whereas the chlorine and fluorine are enriched in the remaining char, and the extent of the enrichment at the latter stage of gasification is larger with the fluorine. The XPS measurements of the chars reveal the presence of the broad F 1 s peak, which can cover a wide range of binding energies attributable to inorganic and organic fluorine. The halogen enrichment during gasification is discussed in terms of secondary reactions of HCl and HF with char.     

Iodine reaction of vinyl acetate/vinyl propionate copolymers. III. Iodine affinities of the radically polymerized copolymers and the copolymers derived from partially saponified polyvinyl acetate

The minimum sequence lengths (n_c) of vinyl acetate (VAc) units necessary to form a colored iodine complex were determined to be 4 and 17 for radically polymerized VAc/vinyl propionate (VPr) and VAc/isopropenyl acetate (IPAc) copolymers, respectively. The iodine affinities (I/VAc) of VAc/VPr copolymers (SP-series) obtained by propionylation of partially saponified polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) were remarkably affected by the saponification conditions. An increase of the water content in acetone/water mixture as saponification solvent brought about a decrease of the iodine affinities of the SP-series. The dependence of the iodine affinity on the saponification of monomer units in the SP-series was compared with that in the radically polymerized VAc/VPr copolymers by taking the sequence probability as the measure of monomer unit distribution. The results strongly supported an occurence of the slide fastener reaction at high degrees of saponification, which was well-known in the saponification of PVAc. Furthermore, it was found that the saponification mode of PVAc at low degrees of saponification was influenced uniquely by the water content in saponification solvents and the saponification temperature.     

Preparation of superacid of iron-supported zirconia for reaction of butane to isobutane

A highly active superacid of 2 wt% Fe-supported ZrO₂ for the skeletal isomerization of butane to isobutane was obtained by sfexposing Fe₂O₃/ZrO₂ to 1 N H₂SO₄ followed by calcining in air at 700°C for more than 24 h; the Fe₂O₃/ZrO₂ was prepared by impregnating zirconia gel with a solution of Fe(NO₃)₃ followed by drying at 300°C (2 wt% Fe). A much lower activity was observed with the opposite procedure, where the first impregnation was sulfation of the gel, followed by a second impregnation with the iron compound. It was proved from analysis of the sulfur content in the catalysts that residual sulfur species were not related with generation of the superacidic sites. XPS showed the catalyst to be Fe₂O₃ supported on ZrO₂.Superacids by metal oxides, VIII. For previous publications VI and VII in this series see refs. [10,11].     

Chaos in parametric resonance flow at water-mercury interface

In the electrochemical system with liquid-liquid interface, intense local convections by the resonance with potential pulses take place. Therefore, with laser beam scattering, temporal movement of the water-mercury interface was observed. As a result, the scattering efficiency showed non-linear oscillation.

Such non-linear response could be controlled by potential pulse height. As the potential height was increased, new scattering peaks in the oscillation emerged, which was expected of a kind of bifurcation phenomenon. From these results, phase portrait, Poincarè section, correlation dimension of the strange attractor and the largest Lyapunov exponent of the trajectories were obtained. Consequently, it was concluded that all the parameters indicate chaotic behavior of the resonance flow.