Marine products require optimal cold storage transport to maintain freshness and minimize damage. Slurry ice is suitable for this purpose due to its softness and immediate cooling capability. This paper describes the process from design to commercialization of a compact icemaker that continuously, stably, and rapidly produces slurry ice and can be placed on fishing vessels. This icemaker is expected to increase the competitiveness of both domestic and international cold chains by advancing both food safety and security.

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Legislation and standardization are necessary and important for fuel quality control to ensure safety, security, and stability with regard to the commercialization and trading of new fuels. The author began R&D of dimethyl ether (DME) fuel utilization technology in 2001. This work involved basic research on fuel spray and combustion, applied research on the development of test vehicles, and field tests of these applications. In addition, work on standardizing DME fuel specifications commenced in 2007. In 2015, five ISO standards were published. In this paper, the standardization of DME fuel is presented, which includes a way to define limits on impurities, and the results of roundrobin-tests for deterioration by impurities from the users’ viewpoint.

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Magnetic tape storage systems are widely used for archive and data backup from their characteristic of low cost and large capacity. Research on magnetic tape targets higher recording densities to meet market needs for continuously increasing storage capacity like in other storage media. Progress on increasing the recording density of magnetic tapes using conventional magnetic metal particles has slowed in the years leading up to 2010. However, progress improved in 2011 with the introduction of tape media using barium-ferrite magnetic particles. In this paper, we describe the process of going from basic research on tape media using barium-ferrite to marketplace introduction.

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Early and accurate diagnosis of malaria is needed to prevent the spread of this parasite. To this end, we developed a novel microarray chip system for the detection of malaria, and evaluated it in Africa. A chip with approximately 20,000 microchambers was developed to detect malaria parasites (hereafter called a cell chip). Leukocytes were removed by filtration columns from whole blood cells. An erythrocyte suspension containing fluorescent nuclear staining dye was dispersed onto the cell chip surface and washed, creating an erythrocyte monolayer in each microchamber that contains more than 2 million erythrocytes. Malaria parasite-infected erythrocytes are then detected using a fluorescence detector. Accurate and rapid detection of the parasites with high sensitivity was achieved by the developed system.

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