Metallic nanoparticles have received a great deal of attention due to their interesting optical, electrical and catalytic properties that can be tuned by morphological control of their nanostructures. These metallic nanostructures are expected to be applied in a wide range of fields such as electronic materials, biological sensing and catalysts as nanomaterials. Various technique can be used to achieve morphological control of nanostructures. Particularly, wet-chemical synthesis using a soft-template is advantageous for large scale preparation of metal nanomaterials, and it has been successfully used to prepare metal nanocrystals with various shapes, including metallic nanowires, nanorings and nanohelices. Here, the syntheses and morphological control of noble metal nanowires using a soft-template method by the author’s group in recent years are mainly described. In addition, the features of the soft-template method using a molecular assembly are summarized.

Structural adhesive is the high-strength adhesive which has been developed for joining of the machine parts and/or assemblies which emphasized the strength, and adhesively bonding technology for it is being called structural adhesion. The history of the structural adhesion is starting for weight saving and is changing into technology for saving energy to the present. Therefore, in this report, a method for design of adhesive bonded joints and several testing methods to evaluate the joint strength are described in strength design of metallic bonded joints based on an outcome of the study which lasts for 30 years of the author. The specific examples of the experimental results using bonded joint specimen and the results of stress analysis with the various shapes of the joints such as a single lap joint, a stepped lap joint, a cylindrical butt joint, a rod-cylinder fitting joint and an adhesive bulk specimen are indicated in this study, and a method of strength evaluation is proposed. Furthermore, the result of experiment using inorganic adhesive is shown about the temperature dependence of the material properties of the adhesive under the high temperature, aiming at the development of the adhesively joining technique for high temperature environment usage.

Acrylate copolymers, which are one of the main components of acrylic pressure-sensitive adhesives（ PSA）, in general have extremely high degree of freedom on material design because they are the combination of various different acrylic monomers. Some of fundamental characteristics of PSA such as cohesiveness, tackiness or adhesion is possibly controlled by both of the amount of functional groups introduced in the copolymer and the amount of cross-linking agents（ e.g. multifunctional isocyanates） added into the PSA. Isocyanate group in cross-linking agents inevitably react not only to hydroxyl group of copolymer side chains but also to water residual in a solvent and moisture in atmosphere, and it has been making estimation of precise reaction rate of isocyanate and hydroxyl groups complicated. Here we report our study of correlation between molecular mobility and adhesion performance investigated by NMR spectroscopy, which unveils reactivity of cross-linking reactions observed in PSA further in detail.