We newly designed and manufactured a new arranging system for a three-dimensional artificial crystal of monosized micro particles. In this system, a robotic micro-manipulator accurately locates the spherical particle onto the lattice point, and subsequently fiber lasers micro-weld the contact points between the neighboring particles. Actually, one- and two-dimensional arrays were constructed using monosized tin particles with the diameter of 400 m. Moreover, due to optimization of the process parameters, we successfully constructed the artificial crystals of simple cubic and diamond structures. In particular, the diamond structure which can represent a large photonic band gap is expected to progress toward a practical photonic crystal device.

Gas release behavior from aluminum and Al 7075 alloy powders during heating in argon was investigated by in-situ gas chromatography. Water vapor, hydrogen, carbon mono-oxide were detected as individual evolution spectra against heating temperature and time. The mechanisms of water and hydrogen evolutions were studied in detail for the determination of effective degassing condition. Magnesium in the alloy powder was found to lower the hydrogen evolution temperature to enhance overall hydrogen release.

The present status of the thennomechanica1 evaluation of functionally gradient materials(FGMs) for space plane application was reviewed, in which research activities and the cooperation of the national project team organized to study FGM science were demonstrated. The project team was divided into three working groups; de singing, processing and evaluation, each of which had their own tasks in the project cooperation. The testings details of the various thennomechanical tests for the FGM samples fabricated by the processing groups were described, along with their corresponding heating conditions of the real environments in the space plane application. For small-sized samples, laser beam heating test and burner heating test were well applied to study the heat shielding and heat resisting properties. Arc-heated wind tunnel test and high temperature!high velocity gas flow test were used for large-sized panel assemblies having cooling structures. The criteria for the evaluation of the heat shielding and heat resisting properties of the FGMs, as well as a crack activation mechanism in their differential temperature heating, were proposed on the basis of the observation in the burner heating test.