Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA, President: Yuichi Tonozuka) has been actively promoting to transfer JAEA's holding technologies to industrial entities. JAEA has granted Nihon Kinzoku Kagaku Ltd. (President: Soichiro Omachi, 1651 Kamekubo Fujimino-city Saitama-prefecture, 20 employees), a commercializing license on vacuum technological patents relating to ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). Nihon Kinzoku Kagaku Ltd. is involved in manufacturing, sales, test and analysis of nonferrous metals. JAEA has also given a technical guidance to Nihon Kinzoku Kagaku Ltd., and has successfully developed the outgas measurement device which can realize a high quality control of aluminum cast products with less porosity. The device has already registered as “Gravi-Mass” and is scheduled to be sold from Nihon Kinzoku Kagaku Ltd. soon.

As for applying the Gravi-Mass to the manufacturing line, Enkei Ltd. which is the largest manufacturing company in Japan in an aluminum tire-wheel area and active in worldwide, is now examining the effect on the quality control due to introduction of the Gravi-Mass into the production process.

The outgas measurement with the Gravi-Mass, which is different from the conventional gas volumetry method, absolutely measure a weight loss of the sample due to the outgassing, and the total outgassing is not influenced by ambient temperature and pressure. Therefore, the Gravi-Mass method is expected to be not only a Japanese standard on the quality control of aluminum products but also a worldwide standard.
The Gravi-Mass will be exhibited at the Collabo-Saitama 2005 fair (held by the Saitama-city's commercial and industrial fair committee) on November 11th to 13th at Saitama super arena in Saitama-city.

Supplementary document