Hydrogenation of unsaturated fatty acid esters using an inductively coupled plasma at low pressure was performed, and electron temperature and density were measured using a double-probe in order to investigate the reaction difference between γ-ray and glow discharge on hydrogenation. In this experiment, unsaturated fatty acid esters were partly hydrogenated by the hydrogen plasma that had electron temperature of 3.5eV, which was more efficient than γ-ray irradiation method. As a result, it was found that the plasma can effectively supply electrons that had the optimum energy for hydrogenation at the interface of fatty acids as well as excited atoms and ions. Also, the plasma generated at low pressure would be possible to convert unsaturated fatty acids into saturated fatty acids without breaking the starting monomer.
The multiple regression analysis done for 50 sets of data of natural terrestrial gamma-ray dose rates collected from different sites of the world led to an empirical formula for the variance of the data as a function of mean value and area. The mean values and areas studied in this paper range from 10 to 100 (nGy/h) and from 10-3 to 107 (km2), respectively. For an isotropic field of fluctuation, a two-dimensional power spectral density (2D PSD) was derived theoretically from the above mentioned empirical formula in a form of S (k) =0.952×10-3m2.02k-2.36, where k (cycles/km) and m (nGy/h) are the wave number and the mean, respectively. The validity of the estimated 2D PSD was confirmed by comparing with PSDs obtained by the following two methods. One is the spatial auto-correlation analysis for several sets of randomly distributed 2D data consisting of more than 170 samples taken through ground surveys. The other is the direct 2D Fourier transform for two sets of 100×100 data matrix picked up from a dose rate map produced through airborne surveys.