Elastic Wave Property of Concrete Decomposed by Steam Pressure Cracking Agent

A steam pressure cracking (SPC) agent is a method that can dismantle concrete safely and quickly. In previous studies, the authors showed that the direction of the crack could be controlled by the tensile stress at the induction holes and not by the compressive stress at the SPC hole. We demonstrate that the compression elastic wave changes to a tensile wave when the wave is reflected at the free surface of the induction hole. We also examined the properties of the concrete by developing an elastic wave measuring system that is difficult to break down even in high-temperature, wet, and radiation environment. The elastic wave velocity change in the four concrete types was less than 4%. It was found that the standard deviation value, σ, changed four times. Therefore, it is possible to determine the deterioration of the internal structure of concrete using the standard deviation value σ, which indicates the dispersion of the elastic wave velocity

Controlled Cracking of Large Size Concrete Structures by a Steam Pressure Cracking Agent

The dismantling of large concrete structures causes environmental pollution due to the dispersion of polluted micro-particles. The purpose of this study is to develop an environmentally friendly demolition method. Steam pressure cracking (SPC) is a method that can safely and quickly separate concrete because there is less vibration compared to the explosion method. To date, the authors have shown that the direction of cracking in a small sample can be controlled by an induction hole. The principle of control is that the elastic wave of compression stress generated from the SPC reaction changes to a tensile elastic wave at the induction hole, and a crack is initiated. In this study, it was shown that the direction of crack propagation can be controlled by using induction holes in large concrete structures that are 1m on each side. Further, in the SPC method, the large amount of concrete powder generated by the explosion method is not produced, and there is no risk of secondary contamination by fine concrete powder. It was also possible to separate small pieces from the end face of the large concrete by SPC and induction holes. The area over which the crack propagated depends on the energy generated from the SPC agent, and the relationship was linear. By applying an SPC agent to dismantling large concrete structures, we can achieve controlled cracking safely and quickly without any environmental pollution.&nbsp

Elastic Wave Property of Concrete Decomposed by Steam Pressure Cracking Agent

A steam pressure cracking (SPC) agent is a method that can dismantle concrete safely and quickly. In previous studies, the authors showed that the direction of the crack could be controlled by the tensile stress at the induction holes and not by the compressive stress at the SPC hole. We demonstrate that the compression elastic wave changes to a tensile wave when the wave is reflected at the free surface of the induction hole. We also examined the properties of the concrete by developing an elastic wave measuring system that is difficult to break down even in high-temperature, wet, and radiation environment. The elastic wave velocity change in the four concrete types was less than 4%. It was found that the standard deviation value, σ, changed four times. Therefore, it is possible to determine the deterioration of the internal structure of concrete using the standard deviation value σ, which indicates the dispersion of the elastic wave velocity

静止衛星データの全球合成技術の開発

Mucopolysaccharidosis type II (MPS II, Hunter syndrome) is an X-linked genetic disorder caused by a deficiency of iduronate 2-sulfatase (IDS), and missense mutations comprising about 30% of the mutations responsible for MPS II result in heterogeneous phenotypes ranging from the severe to the attenuated form. To elucidate the basis of MPS II from the structural viewpoint, we built structural models of the wild type and mutant IDS proteins resulting from 131 missense mutations (phenotypes: 67 severe and 64 attenuated), and analyzed the influence of each amino acid substitution on the IDS structure by calculating the accessible surface area, the number of atoms affected and the root-mean-square distance. The results revealed that the amino acid substitutions causing MPS II were widely spread over the enzyme molecule and that the structural changes of the enzyme protein were generally larger in the severe group than in the attenuated one. Coloring of the atoms influenced by different amino acid substitutions at the same residue showed that the structural changes influenced the disease progression. Based on these data, we constructed a database of IDS mutations as to the structures of mutant IDS proteins

ショウニ ガン カンジ ノ ペーパー ペイシェント ヲ モチイタ トウツウ ハンダン ト トウツウ カンワ ニ カンスル イシ カンゴシ ノ ニンシキ

小児がんの医療に携わる医師と看護師を対象に、小児がんの疼痛緩和に関する医師・看護師の認識と課題を明らかにすることを目的に、幼児期と思春期のペーパーペイシェントを用いて質問紙調査を行った。その結果、除痛の方法に関して、疼痛の病態や原因を鑑別して患児の苦痛を軽減するために、医師・看護師は試行錯誤しながら治療やケアに取り組んでいる状況が明らかになった。幼児期は、医師は患児への説明に困難を感じており、検査や処置に関連した疼痛緩和の方法として鎮静下での実施を重視し、看護師は遊びやプレパレーション、家族の付添など心理的サポートを重視していた。思春期では、医師・看護師ともに疼痛評価や除痛の難しさを感じており、口内炎による疼痛について含嗽薬や強オピオイドなど薬物投与による予防的関わりを重視していた。相違点として、看護師は薬物投与以外に、クーリングや口腔ケア、食事の工夫を挙げていた。小児がんの疼痛緩和に向けて、他職種と連携を図り協働して取り組むことの重要性、小児がん治療の薬物選択の拡大、がん性疼痛治療ガイドラインの必要性が示唆された。A questionnaire survey was conducted involving physicians and nurses engaged in medical care of childhood cancer cases using paper patients concerning stages in early childhood and puberty, in order to clarify attitudes and issues of physicians and nurses towards pain‑relief in cases of childhood cancer. The results revealed that, regarding the administrative methods for pain‑relief, physicians and nurses applied treatment and care through trial and error in order to distinguish the cause of the clinical condition and relieving the children\u27s pain. In early childhood cases, physicians found it difficult to explain the matter to the children, and thus emphasized administering pain‑relief under sedation as a method associated with a test or procedure. Nurses, on the other hand, emphasized psychological support such as playing, preparation and family attendance. At puberty, both physicians and nurses found difficulty in evaluating the relieving of pain. They emphasized preventative involvement with drug administration such as mouthwashes or potent opioids for pain caused by stomatitis. Nurses also emphasized cooling, oral care, and dietary improvement. These results showed the importance of addressing pain‑relief while coordinating efforts and cooperating with other professionals, drug selection extension in the treatment of childhood cancer cases, and the necessity of guidelines for treating the cancer‑related pain

Effort toward Characterization of Selected Lunar Sites for the Radiometric Calibration of Solar Reflective Bands

The Moon, due to its inherent reflectance stability and negligible atmosphere effect, has been used as a solar diffuser for the satellite instrument radiometric calibration in the solar reflective wavelength. Currently the lunar disk-equivalent irradiance is most commonly used to trend the instrument on-orbit degradation. Yet the accurate observation and simulation of the lunar irradiance are greatly challenged with the changes in lunar phase and libration. This is especially the case for the geostationary weather instruments in which the lunar image are obtained at any phase angles when the Moon appear within the instrument field of regard. Alternatively one can use lunar radiance at selected uniform sites as calibration reference, provided that the viewing and illuminating geometric effects at these sites can be well characterized. Two key techniques have been identified toward the site characterizations for the lunar radiance model development: relatively uniform site selections and auto-coregistration of satellite images for radiance extraction. NOAA recently has identified a set of spectrally and geospatially relatively uniform sites based on the high spectral and spatial resolution measurements of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lunar orbital SELENE instruments. Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) Himawari-8 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI), which has a very similar optical design as GOES-R Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), has already acquired substantial lunar images since its launch in October 2014. These lunar images provide an opportunity to develop an accurate lunar radiance model for the radiometric calibration validation of new generation of GEO instruments. In this study, we evaluate the selected lunar targets with the Himawari-8 AHI data. Our early results from one AHI lunar-tracing event images show apparent bidirectional reflectance function (BRDF) effect at the selected sites. Effort and progress to characterize the BRDF effects at the selected sites will be reported in the coming meeting

Improvement in ABI/AHI Lunar Image Registration Algorithm for the Extraction of Lunar ROI Radiance

The Moon, due to its extremely stable surface, has been a great interest to the satellite instrument calibration community for instrument in-orbit calibration, sensor-to-sensor inter-calibration, and historical data re-analyses. Yet using the lunar surface as a solar diffuser is always challenged with its non-uniform and non-Lambertian reflectance. To minimize the reflectance variation caused by the phase angle and libration variations, NOAA, in collaboration with Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), are developing a lunar radiance calibration model over a set of selected region of interest (ROI) which are identified with both lunar hyperspectral and broad-band measurements, and lunar laser altimeter data as well. Yet accurate image-to-image registration to extract accurate ROI radiance is critical for the model development, especially for the images of relatively low spatial resolution bands. Two automatic image registration methods have been developed at NOAA over the past few years – a theoretic method to predict the ROI positions and an empirical algorithm based on the matched local features. Although the theoretic algorithm can well predict the central Moon position, the accuracy of ROI locations is often affected by fluctuations of instrument performance. The current empirical algorithm can successfully achieve the registration accuracy at sub-pixel level for the lunar images within certain phase angle difference, but the registration error increases when the images have large phase angle differences, due to the misclassification of potentially matched features over the global images. In this study, we are proposing to combine the theoretical and empirical methods to increase the number of matched features by restricting the searching area. The resulted lunar ROI radiance will be used to analyze the GOES-16 ABI and Himawari-8 AHI instrument degradations and compared with the solar calibrated data

The Diagnosis, Derivation and Validation of a Point Spread Function to Mitigate the Slight Blurring Manifested in the MTSAT-1R Visible Channel Imagery

The Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT)-1R is a geostationary imager located at 140°E over the tropical western pacific operated by the Japanese Meteorological Agency and was launched on February 26, 2005. It has been operational from June 2005 to June 2010 and now serves as the backup instrument when the MTSAT-2 ground segment is maintained annually during November and December. The Clouds and the Earth\u27s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project utilizes geostationary (GEO) derived broadband fluxes to infer the regional diurnal cycle between CERES observed broadband observations. The GEO visible channels are first calibrated against Aqua-MODIS using ray-matched coincident 0.5° gridded radiance pairs, which are regressed monthly to determine the GEO calibration coefficients. Unlike other GEOs the MTSAT-1R visible channel exhibited a nonlinear sensor response. In order to ensure that the ray-matching algorithm is not introducing any systematic biases, the navigation, the MTSAT-1R and MODIS spectral band differences, and MTSAT-1R space offset are carefully examined and were determined not to be the cause. Also Terra-MODIS or TRMM-VIRS and MTSAT-1R ray-matched radiance pairs also showed similar nonlinear behavior. However, VIRS onboard the TRMM precessing satellite, revealed that the nonlinear behavior was dependent on solar zenith angle or dynamic range. No further progress could be achieved until coincident MTSAT-2 and MTSAT-1R images taken in December 2010 became available. Comparing the coincident imagery the image blurring effect was noticeable. Dark regions neighboring bright clouds within 500-km were brightened. This effect was not noticed in the IR imagery, even though both visible and IR optical paths are shared. The slight blurring effect is attributed to the mirror surface by either flawed polishing or by a dust contaminant. The dispersed light of the signal was assumed to be small and randomly distributed around the optical axis allowing the image to be deconvolved using an inverted point spread function. The PSF removed ~80% of the blurring effect and the MTSAT-1R sensor observed a linear response when ray-matched with Aqua-MODIS radiance pairs. This chain of events, emphasizes the need for coincident imagery when replacing operational GEO imagers, as part of the commissioning process. If MTSAT-2, which was launched in February 2006, provided coincident imagery with MTSAT-1R within a few months after launch, retrieval quality imagery could have been available 5-years earlier