Innovative SMC with low iron loss was made from iron powders with evaporated MgO insulation coating. The coating had greater heat-resistance than conventional phosphatic insulation coating, which enabled stress relieving annealing at higher temperature. Magnetic properties of toroidal samples (OD35mm,ID25mm, t5) were examined. The iron loss at 50Hz for Bm = 1.5T was lower 50% of conventional SMC and was almost the same with silicon iron laminations(t0.35). It became clear that MgO insulation coating has enough heat resistance and adhesiveness to powdersurface to obtain innovative SMC with low iron loss.

Influences of machining on magnetic properties of soft magnetic composites (SMC's) with addition of two kinds of binder, i.e., organic binder and inorganic one, were investigated. Machining does not affect DC magnetic properties of the SMC compacts. This can be ascribed to their particular structure in which the ironpowder particles are highly isolated by the binder. On the other hand, decrease in resistivity and resultant increase in eddy current loss was confirmed in the machined compacts containing inorganic binder. It is supposed that the brittleadditive binder existing between the iron particles is partly broken, and iron-to-iron contact is formed on the machined surface.

Improvement of the strength is one of the most important subjects on soft magnetic composite (SMC) to increase the applica ble items. In this study, lubricants for inner lubricating SMC, which can be produced in lower cost than die wall-lubricatin g SMC, varied to investigate their effect on the strength. The newly developed SMC with self-lubricating resin shows high st rength equivalent to that of SMC obtained by die wall lubrication.

Sr2Ta2O7, a layered perovskite compound, has been reported to possess most excellent photocatalytic properties among the layered perovskite materials. Recently, we have demonstrated that Ba5Ta4O15 that was prepared under a mol ratio of Ba: Ta=1:1 has high photocatalytic performance as well as Sr2Ta2O7. In this study, the photocatalyst samples with a mol ratio of Sr: Ba: Ta = (1-x): x: 1 were prepared. The maximum photocatalytic performance was obtained for x= 0.2, which is three times as high as that of undoped Sr2Ta2O7.

Three-dimensional artificial crystals with periodicity corresponding to terahertz wave lengths were fabricated by self-assembling monosized metal spherical particles. The metal crystals were weakly sintered to utilize them as templates. The metal templates were inverted to air spheres crystal embedded in dielectric resin though infiltration and etching. The resulting resin inverted crystals clearly presented the photonic stop gaps within terahertz wave region and the frequencies of the gaps were confirmed to agree well with calculation by plane wave expansion method.