The present review gives a brief outline of the concept on the static surface tension and describes the

reliability, precision, and its applicability of a new tensiometry, optical bubble pressure method toward simple

to complex solution systems. The method improves the accuracy by eliminating adsorption of solute onto solid

component of the tensiometer and application to sol-gel transition phenomena is also described.

This study investigated a nondestructive imaging method for morphological characterization of adhesive

bondlines in wood-based materials using X-ray micro-computed tomography（ CT）. Softwood and hardwood

plywood were prepared using phenol-formaldehyde resin adhesive（ PF）; hardwood glulam was prepared using

water-based polymer-isocyanate adhesive. These materials were scanned using six industrial X-ray CT apparatuses.

Each resulting scan was reconstructed into three-dimensional grayscale voxel data and saved as a

stack of grayscale slice images. In softwood plywood images with field of view（ FOV） of approximately 30 mm

diameter, tracheids and PF resin in tracheid lumen but were not clearly visualized. In contrast, in softwood

plywood images with FOV of 3.6 mm diameter, tracheids and PF resin in tracheid lumen were clearly visualized.

In hardwood plywood images with FOV of 3.6 mm diameter, PF resin in vessels and its crack were clearly

visualized, probably owing to resin shrinkage during solidification in the vessels. In hardwood glulam images

with FOV of 0.8 mm diameter, resin at the bondline and its internal heterogeneity were visualized. The developed

method realizes morphological observations in wood-based materials with FOV of several mm diameter

and can be applied to a wide variety of wood adhesion studies such as the investigation of the effects of morphological

characteristics on material strengths.

In situ analysis of the residual stress in a glass fiber-reinforced resole-type phenolic resin and aluminum

foil composite material during curing and thermal-cycle testing was performed via X-ray diffraction

measurements of Al（422）-plane using the sin2 Ψ method. In the curing process, the residual stress at the

resin and aluminum interface changed due to the difference in the magnitude of the thermal expansion and

contraction between them, which arose by the difference in the coefficient of the thermal expansion（ CTE）,

and a cure-shrinkage of the resin. Additionally, the behavior of the stress change was greatly influenced by the

glass-transition of the resin which involved a large CTE change of the resin. The stress-free temperature was

successfully determined by the stress-change during the thermal cycle, in which the resin-aluminum interface

in the investigated composite was in a stress-free state at 160 ℃. The continuous stress change during curing

showed that the residual stress in the cured composite was strongly affected by the stress state before curing,

suggesting that the stress-free temperature could be controlled by the composite molding process.

This report focuses on recent efforts to prepare single component element-block materials based on cage

silsesquioxane frameworks. Polyhedral octasilsesquioxanes （POSSs）, denoted as （RSiO1.5）8 or labeled T8 cages

are used here as the cage silsesquioxane frameworks. Thermoplastic optically transparent silsesquioxane materials

derived from a single cage compound can be achieved by dumbbell- and star-shaped cage structures,

allowing precise design their structures for tuning properties. Incompletely condensed POSS exhibited lower

crystallinity without loss of thermal stability in comparison with a completely condensed POSS. Di-functional

POSS monomers, which were prepared by a selective corner-opening reaction and a subsequent corner-capping

reaction, significantly reduce their crystallinity in comparison with those of mono-functionalized T8 cages.

Several examples for polymerization of the di-functional POSS monomers are described.