Synthesiology English edition
Online ISSN : 1883-2318
Print ISSN : 1883-0978
ISSN-L : 1883-0978
Volume 5, Issue 2
Displaying 1-8 of 8 articles from this issue
Research papers
  • — Understanding the oceanic history through precise chemical and isotope analyses of coral annual bands —
    Atsushi SUZUKI
    2012 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 78-87
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: December 27, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Global warming (due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has attracted much attention. Yet, predicting trends in the Earth's climate remains difficult. A more sophisticated and accurate Global Warming model can be obtained by reconstructing climatic change since the Industrial Revolution, and other past periods of warming. To this end, a promising area of research in marine science is coral skeletal climatology, which offers a unique method for accurately reconstructing marine temperature and saline concentration over the past several hundred years, with a high temporal resolution (ca. 2 weeks) based on chemical and isotope analysis of long-lived coral skeletons. This method has been successfully applied to the Little Ice Age around the 18th century and the mid-Pliocene warming period of 3.5 million years ago. It can also be applied to biological and environment studies on massive coral bleaching events caused by unusually high oceanic temperature levels and other environmental issues such as ocean acidification.
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  • — A large-scale laboratory reactor for methane hydrate production tests —
    Jiro NAGAO
    2012 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 88-95
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: December 27, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Natural gas hydrates off the shores of Japan are valuable resources for the country. To utilize these resources, it is necessary to establish a gas production technology and investigate suitable conditions for extraction of methane from methane hydrate reservoirs. While core-scale dissociation experiments yield reproducible results on how methane hydrate dissociates under various conditions, a production test at a real gas field would provide information about the type of dissociation phenomena occurring in a geological reservoir field. The performance of natural gas production from methane hydrate reservoirs is dependent upon the size and characteristics of reservoirs, such as temperature and permeability. In other words, while a core-scale dissociation test in a laboratory can demonstrate the heat transport process, dissociation in an actual reservoir is dominated by the material flow process. Thus, I believe that it is important to couple data obtained from core-scale tests with the results of field-scale tests by using a large-scale laboratory reactor in which dissociation experiments can be conducted under similar conditions to the actual reservoir. In this paper, I report the goals of the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Program being conducted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan, and describe the research objective of a large-scale laboratory reactor for methane hydrate production tests at MHRC (Methane Hydrate Research Center) of AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology).
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  • — A proposal for production control by multi-scale hierarchical modeling —
    Kiyoshi NISHIOKA, Yasushi MIZUTANI, Hironori UENO, Hirofumi KAWASAKI, ...
    2012 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 96-113
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: December 27, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Integrated optimization of production in the steel industry to simultaneously minimize lead time and improve productivity is a real challenge. Lean manufacturing, recognized as a leading successful example of such optimization, is characterized by synchronization of time scale of production with that of the mainline. However, in the steel industry, it is inherently difficult to implement synchronization and reduction of production time to the same degree as in the automobile industry. This difficulty motivated our method for integrated optimization of production at the plant level in the steel industry, by modeling the production control as a multi-scale hierarchical structure in time. This paper describes an attempt to systematize production knowledge in industry by a synthesis of practical knowledge (of shop-floor engineers) and company experiences.
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  • — System linkage via data mediation —
    Itsuki NODA
    2012 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 114-127
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: December 27, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Various “ unexpected ” situations caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake severely hampered disaster-control systems of Japanese national and local governments. A flexible framework for disaster information systems that is reorganizable depending on circumstances is required to mitigate such serious situations. In this article, I propose the concept of “ loose linkages ” of information systems based on data mediation and a platform for disaster mitigation information sharing. The platform enables us to link various systems quickly, so that we can reconstruct disaster information systems according to various situations in major disasters. I found that the concept was effective for the Great East Japan Earthquake along with various ad-hoc activities of information volunteers. We should spread this concept and platform to Japanese national and local governments, and support organizations to prepare for future disasters.
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Round-table talk
  • Tateo ARIMOTO, Naoto KOBAYASHI, Motoyuki AKAMATSU
    2012 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 128-133
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: December 27, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    One of the aims of the Fourth Science and Technology Basic Plan, which was decided by the Government of Japan last August, is to create “solution-seeking” or “issue-driven” innovations such as green innovation and life innovation. The Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST-RISTEX) is promoting various R&D programs that lead to the implementation of the research results in society. Because this approach is in line with Synthesiology, we talked to Dr. Tateo Arimoto, Director of JST-RISTEX, in a roundtable talk session.
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